The author of the Library also drew on a variety of other sources. Besides epic poetry, his earlier sources would naturally have included lyric and elegiac poetry, and the tragic Muse, as was stated in the little poem attributed to him. The great Attic dramatists of the fifth century generally relied on heroic mythology for their plots, in particular the stories associated with the Argive and Theban royal families and the Trojan War. But they adapted the traditional stories with considerable freedom, whether for dramatic effect or to develop a moral of their own, and were thus responsible for some striking innovations which had a marked influence on the development of the tradition. In certain cases the tragedians contributed the canonic version of a particular story, while in many others they provided appealing variants. Both aspects of this influence are evident in the Library . Thus the account of the life of Oedipus is in the main a summary of Sophocles version in his Oedipus plays, for this became the canonic version, largely displacing the very different accounts in early epic; but the plot of a play by Euripides on Alcmaion (p. 114) is included merely as an interesting variant, in a supplement to the main account based on the earlier tradition.
To proceed to the Hellenistic poets, Apollodorus based his account of the voyage of the Argonauts on the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, a relatively late epic written in the third century BC. As was common in that age, Apollonius was a scholar as well as a poet, and he made extensive use of the early sources in composing his poem. For certain stories, however, such as the murder of Apsyrtos (p. 54), the author of the Library prefers to report a more primitive version than was found acceptable in this late epic. Otherwise his interests diverge from those of the Hellenistic poets, who tended to concern themselves with the more recondite aspects of the tradition, and he draws on them only for the occasional learned variant. As to the mythographical literature of this period, it was observed above that he would have made use of the resources that it provided. It is likely that some of his narratives are based on Hellenistic summaries of epic or tragic plots; and mythical variants, collections of references, and alternative genealogies may often have been drawn from Hellenistic handbooks. Apollodorus would have valued such literature as a source of instant erudition, but there is nothing to indicate that the Library is marked in any deeper sense by Hellenistic scholarship, and the author had no interest whatever in the rationalistic interpretations favoured by many Hellenistic scholars.
Over a millennium has passed since Photius suggested that
the Library was not without its value to those who attach some importance to the memory of the ancient stories. Does this still apply for the modern reader? And even if the Library is of some practical use for its summaries of the main myths and the other information that it provides, is that the most that can be said for it?
As the only comprehensive mythical history of Greece to survive from antiquity, it is certainly the case that it has been used extensively by scholars and amateurs of myth in modern times. It is no accident that the major mythographical work of C. G. Heyne, the founder of modern scholarly mythography (who was responsible for introducing the word myth into modern usage), should have been an edition of the Library accompanied by an exhaustive commentary. And ever since, authors of mythological dictionaries and compendia have relied heavily on the Library for their accounts of the main myths. This will be readily apparent if relevant passages from Robert Graves Greek Myths , for instance, or Pierre Grimals dictionary of classical mythology are checked against the text of the Library . It must be said, however, that despite the undoubted usefulness of the Library , writers on Greek mythology tend to refer to it with condescension or even disdain, and the neglect of it in the scholarly literature confirms that it is generally regarded as a work of no great substance.
In reaching a judgement on the value of the Library , we must take due account of the genre that it belongs to; for a summary handbook of this kind, compiled by collecting and epitomizing material from earlier sources, belongs to a mediocre, or at least a secondary, genre. The value of such a work will not derive from any originality or serious scholarship on the authors part. He is simply an editor. Nor should we expect such a work to have any literary merit (beyond a tolerably clear presentation of the mythical narrative, which is generally the case with the Library) . If Apollodorus main sources had survived, the Library would be no more than a historical curiosity, and the work as a whole would possess no greater value than the summary of the Iliad on p. 153. But if his main sources are taken to be primarily the works of the early mythographer-historians, very little of them has been preserved, so we must ask: can a compilation of this kind convey anything of value from them, and in the present case, is it reasonable to assume that it does? Now this is surely an area in which a writer of very modest capabilities could perform a useful service. Mythology is not at all like philosophy, for instance, where subtleties of thought and essential points in the reasoning can easily be lost in the process of summarization. If a mythical epitomist shows reasonable discrimination in the selection of resources, he merely needs the ability to summarize the stories clearly and accurately, and to be thorough in transmitting genealogical and other information which may be of less immediate appeal but is essential if the individual stories are to be ordered into a coherent mythical history. In this respect, the author of the Library certainly demonstrates the necessary thoroughness, and where his narratives can be compared with surviving sources, we can see that his summaries are generally reliable.