To draw a tentative conclusion from these brief reflections, there are aspects of the work which suggest that the common (but by no means universal) view that the Library was written for use in schools is open to serious question. It could well have been written as a summary handbook for a more general audience (although schoolmasters may also have found it useful), and the authors concern for completeness and inclusion of full genealogies ensures that it has genuine virtues both as a summary of the tradition and a reference work. The shortcomings of the work derive from its extreme brevity rather than any essential flaw in the compilers approach to his task.
The material in the Library is drawn from a wide variety of sources, whether original poetic sources, from early epic to the learned compositions of the early Hellenistic poets, or mythographical compilations which offered prose summaries of mythical tales. Since the authors main purpose was to provide an account of the most important early myths, we might expect that he would have been interested primarily in earlier sources, in particular early epic and the works of the fifth-century chroniclers, who were amongst the earliest prose writers. If we consider which sources are cited most frequently by name, we find some confirmation of this. Of poets, Hesiod is named most often (eleven times) and then Homer (five times), and of prose writers, two less familiar figures, Pherecydes (thirteen times) and Acousilaos (ten times), who wrote on mythical history in the fifth century BC. This provides only an approximate measure because Apollodorus sometimes cites authorities for specific traditions or variants, but rarely indicates the main source that he was following in each stage in the work. The emphasis on early historical and epic sources is nevertheless significant.
The
question of sources concerns not only the origin of individual stories, but also the structure and organization of the various cycles of myth. The Greek mythological tradition, as summarized in a broadly representative manner in the Library , is in many respects a peculiar one. It is dominated to an unusual degree by heroic mythology, and the material from heroic legend is organized in such a way that it provides an unusually coherent pre-history of the regions covered. As has been remarked, stories are rarely located in an indeterminate past; each is fitted into its appropriate place, whether in relation to the history of a specific place and the successive generations of its ruling family, or to the development of a great adventure or the life history of a major hero. For the most part, this systematization was not the work of the scholarly mythographers of the Hellenistic era, but was achieved at a relatively early period by the epic poets and by prose writers who regarded themselves as historians rather than mythographers. Indeed, the beginning of the process by which the mass of often mutually inconsistent myths in the oral tradition was ordered into a coherent pseudo-historical pattern can be traced to the earliest Greek literature to be recorded in writing, the Homeric epics and Hesiods Theogony , and the process was brought to fruition in the works of the fifth-century mythographer-historiansprecisely the sources most frequently cited in the Library . First we must consider the nature of these early sources and their contribution to this process, and then how the author of the Library made use of them.
Until the development of prose literature in the latter part of the sixth century, Greek literature was exclusively poetic, and the richest sources for myth and legend were the works of the epic poets. The earliest epics to survive, the two Homeric epics and Hesiods Theogony , were probably written about the same time towards the end of the eighth century. Although they belong to the same broad genre, the poems attributed to these authors are quite different in nature. Homer was a story-teller on a grand scale and each of the Homeric epics is constructed on the basis of an overall plot running through the whole poem. But Hesiod organized his Theogony on a genealogical basis; and generally speaking, in a genealogical poem of such a kind the stories associated with the various figures are inserted successively as the figures are introduced in the genealogies, and the narratives are relatively brief and self-contained. These contrary approaches can be related to the two main ways in which the mythical material is organized in different parts of the Library , the narrative ordering in the histories of great adventures like the voyage of the Argonauts and the Trojan War (or in the life of Heracles), and the genealogical ordering in large stretches of the histories of the great families, where we find an alternation between genealogical sections and narratives recounting the stories associated with the heroes and heroines as they are successively introduced in the genealogies. We will examine first how the works of the epic poets who could be regarded as the successors of Homer contributed to the establishment of standard accounts of the greater mythical adventures, and then how the Hesiodic approach was extended in a later epic to cover heroic mythology, resulting in the development of an all-embracing genealogical system.