C. Ruiz Montero, La Morfologia de la Biblioteca de Apolodoro, Faventia , 8 (1986), 2940. (Not seen.)
E. Schwartz, Apollodoros, RE 1, 287586.
Other Ancient Mythographical Works
Two have been translated into English:
Hyginus, The Myths , trans, and ed. M. Grant, Lawrence, Kan. 1960. (A chaotic and often unreliable Latin compendium, probably dating from the second century AD; this volume also includes a translation of the Poetic Astronomy , the largest surviving collection of constellation myths, which forms Book II of Hyginus Astronomy.)
Antoninus Liberalis, Metamorphoses , trans. F. Celoria, London, 1992. (An anthology of transformation myths dating from circa second century AD; the stories are of Hellenistic origin for the most part.)
There are also French translations of Antoninus Liberalis and Hyginus Astronomy in the Budé series.
The summaries by Proclus of the early epics in the Trojan cycle are translated in Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns in the Loeb series.
Book IV of the universal history by Diodorus of Sicily is a mythical history of Greece; for a translation, see Diodorus Siculus, vols. 2 and 3, in the Loeb series. (It is less complete than the Library of Apollodorus, and the stories are often rationalized; the biography of Heracles is especially interesting.)
Mythological dictionaries and compendia
The excellent dictionary by Pierre Grimal is available in two different editions, as the Dictionary of Classical Mythology (Oxford, 1986, com plete edn., with references to ancient sources), or the Penguin Dictionary of Classical Mythology (Harmondsworth, 1991, a convenient abridged edn.). William Smiths Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology , 3 vols. (London, 1844) is still of value for the mythological entries by Leonhard Schmitz, which are long, generally reliable, and give full references. Robert Graves compendium, The Greek Myths, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth, 1955) is comprehensive and attractively written (but the interpretative notes are of value only as a guide to the authors personal mythology); and Karl Kerenyi in The Gods of the Greeks (London, 1951) and The Heroes of the Greeks (London, 1974) has also retold many of the old stories in his own way. H. J. Roses Handbook of Greek Mythology (London, 1928) has not aged well, but it is useful on divine mythology in particular.
Other Books on Greek Myth
The literature is vast, and only a few suggestions can be offered here. For those first approaching the subject (and others too), Fritz Graf, Greek Mythology: An Introduction (Baltimore, 1993), can be recommended unreservedly, as a concise but remarkably complete survey, examining the varieties
of Greek myth and also changing attitudes to the myths and their interpretation in ancient and modern times, with helpful bibliographies. To this, three other works may be added which, in their different ways, convey an idea of the distinctive nature of Greek myth: K. Dowden, The Uses of Greek Mythology (London, 1992), a lively introductory work; G. S. Kirk, The Nature of Greek Myths (Harmondsworth, 1974), and above all, R. C. A. Buxton, Imaginary Greece: Contexts of Mythology (Cambridge, 1994), a very rich and suggestive study.
Timothy Gantzs Early Greek Myth (Baltimore, 1993) is an invaluable guide to the literary and artistic evidence on the early mythological tradition. T. H. Carpenter, Art and Myth in Ancient Greece: A Handbook (London, 1991) offers a useful introduction to the treatment of myth in the visual arts. M. L. West, The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women (Oxford, 1985), explains the origins and nature of the genealogical scheme for heroic mythology which was adopted and developed by the early mythographer-historians, and thence by the author of the Library .
Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths? (Chicago, 1988), examines the complex and inconsistent attitudes of the Hellenistic and later Greeks to their traditional myths, and M. Detienne, The Creation of Mythology (Chicago, 1986), the development of our modern conception of mythology. On modern approaches to the interpretation of Greek myth since the eighteenth century, see Grafs discussion, and also the illuminating survey by J.-P. Vernant in Myth and Society in Ancient Greece (Brighton, 1966). And finally, two volumes of essays may be mentioned which show some of the ways in which scholars of the present day approach the interpretation of myth: J. N. Bremmer (ed.), Interpretations of Greek Mythology (London, 1987) and L. Edmunds, Approaches to Greek Myth (Baltimore, 1990).
THE LIBRARY OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY
CONTENTS
THE original text of the Library contains no formal subdivisions or chapter headings; at most, the author occasionally indicates that he has concluded his account of one family and is passing on to the next. This can make a modern edition difficult to use, even where it is prefaced with an analytical summary, and a reader first approaching the work is likely to feel, quite mistakenly, that it is formless or even chaotic. To overcome these problems, and to make the works implicit structure immediately intelligible, I have divided the book into titled chapters and subsections, as summarized in the following table. In the text, these headings, which form no part of the original text, are italicized.