Regular marked price: $19.95Discount Price: $13.57
Cost Savings: $6.38 (32%)Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Usually ships in 7 to 11 days
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 292.13
EAN num: 9780140171990
ISBN number: 0140171991
Label: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 784
Printing Date: April 06, 1993
Publishing house: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Sale Popularity Level: 94784
Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
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.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers -
First half of Greek mythology reference and stories.
A swashbuckling adventure story writer Graves most certainly wasn't, but that didn't stop me reading this many times. Of course, in a more reference oriented version as this there are many, many notes etc. to let you delve into this as deeply as you like.
4 out of 5
Rated by buyers 
-
This book was a revolutionary work in it's time. It examined the Goddess religion and pre-Greek beliefs in an objective and interesting way. The fundamental problem with it is that Graves was not an anthropologist. He links practically every Greek myth with Pelasgian/Minoan king sacrifice rituals. This is really irksome in that while the Pelasgian/Minoan model was neglected by chauvinist academics for years and years (and still is), he makes some statements about pre-Greek Aegean culture which is pure conjecture and presents them as fact. Also, he states that Orphism came about because of Egyptian refugees fleeing from the Amonist backlash against Ahkenaton. Never mind that the dating does not work and he presents absolutely no material proof for this. He does this type of thing through the whole work. The bottom line is that sometimes he is dead on the money and other times he could be talking about "Star Wars!" The basic problem is that Graves approached the subject inductively, rather than deductively. So, one MUST read this book with a critical mind.
Rated by buyers 
-
Robert Graves is known for his eccentricities and eclectic readings of the classic Greek myths. But this is the definitive edition because it gives the literary sources, from Homer to Pausanias and many others. I also own the Folio Society's slipcased, handsomely illustrated edition of the same work. For reasons that I cannot even guess at, its editors decided to omit the sources, an omission that I believe destroys its value. The only problem with the paperback edition is that it wears out sooner rather than later, but the price is such that replacing it is affordable.
Rated by buyers -
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 ... Read More
Rated by buyers 
-
Graves confirms that the only way to learn of the Greek myths is to read what the Greeks themselves wrote. If the desire is to understand what the Greek myths actually mean then Graves should be avoided. Robin Hard, in his translation to Apollodorus' Library of Greek Mythology, published by OUP, writes "the interpretive notes [to Graves' Greek Myths] are of value only as a guide to the author's personal mythology." (p.xxxiii). I cannot agree more.
Graves' immediate failure is that he remains oblivious to the ouranographic nature of Greek myth: their myths were related to the heavens. Further, Graves fails to understand the relationship of Greek myth to the development of Greek philosophy; that the key to understanding Greek philosophy, science (& hence mathematics & engineering), is the mythology. If you read Graves you will understand neither Greek myth or philosophy.
In Timaeus Plato wrote that when the creator "had compounded the whole he divided it up into as many souls as there were stars, and allotted each soul to a star." (Timaeus, 42).
In Apollonius' Argonautica we read of the argonaughts who paused as "the goddess Persephone sent up to them the mourning ghost of Aktor's son, who craved to see some men of his own kind ...[and having done so, he] Then sank down again into the great abyss." Book 2, lines 920.
In Homer's Odyssey we read that "Rose-fingered Dawn fell in love with Orion... outraged at her conduct... chaste Artemis rose from her golden throne, attacked him in Ortygia with her gentle darts and left him dead." Book 5, lines 121-124. When given directions for sailing, Odysseus kept his eyes "on the Pleiads...or the Great Bear [who] looks across at Orion the Hunter with a wary eye." Book 5, 272-274; and once in the Halls of Hades, which lie beyond the horizon, Odysseus' "eyes fell on the giant hunter Orion, ... armed with a club of solid bronze..." Book 11, 571-575
Aristotle explains to us what all this means: "From old - and indeed extremely ancient times there has been handed down to our later age intimations of a mythical character to the effect that the stars are gods... further details were added in the manner of myth." Metaphysics, Book Lambda, 1074b.
If you read Graves you will not encounter any understanding of the heavens, the basis of Greek myth, in which the planets and constellations were the detritus of times past, rendered immortal and writ large in the heavens. This absence is explained by Graves, when he extols his belief that even "the 13th century Excidium Troiae is, in parts mythically sounder than the Iliad." p. 13. What Graves claims is that an author who commented on the myths over 2000 years after Homer actually wrote down the myths, understood them better than the person who expounded them.
Instead of looking to the sky to understand these myths, Graves claims that the only way to properly understand them is when "archaeologists can provide a more exact tabulation of tribal movements in Greece and the dates." p.20; and that consequently "A large part of Greek myth is politico-religious history."(p.17). This is seriously misguided!
Graves as becomes evident has an agenda which he lays bare when he claims Greek & Jewish myth is a product of:
"The Jews as inheritors of the 'Pelasgian', or Canaanitish, creation myth.." p. 35; that is that the people of Greece, before the arrival of Greeks were the same people as those who peopled Canaan (Palestine, which is utterly unsupported by any archaeology). What Graves attempts with this ridiculous tome, is to provide a syncretist misinterpretation of Greek myth to reconcile it with the irreconcilable Biblical beliefs and he imagines he achieves this when he weaves into this his "matrilineal v patrilineal" theory as some sort of corroboration. This explains why Graves claimed that a later, Greek Christian from Byzantium, wrote a sounder mythology than Homer: the Byzantine, being Christian, had the same disposition to reinterpret Greek myths to make them more acceptable to a Christian viewpoint, as does Graves.
Greek myths are beautiful if they can be understood. Graves omits the ouranographic dimension of Greek belief because, as he makes clear, he is actually attempting to reconcile it with Jewish (hence Christian) belief. No such reconciliation can work if the author is honest. The Greeks studied the heavens; the Jews were forbidden to do so on pain of death, eg. Deuteronomy 17.2-5 & Jeremiah 10.2. Graves' book is embarrassingly silly.
(...)
Find other books like this one:
