The Myths of Greece and Rome Book

Classical Mythology - Insights & Images

by Stephen L. Harris and Gloria Platzner

Third Edition published 2001 by Mayfield Publishing Company Mountain View California, London, Toronto ISBN 0 7674 1549 3

Designed for undergraduate students. Abundantly illustrated with examples of architecture, sculpture and paintings. It includes a great amount of primary material as one would expect from a text book. Easy to read translations of classical narrative poems and epic Greek plays written by Homer, Virgil and other main Graeco-Roman historians and philosophers.
It explores the relationship between myth, art, religion, history and society. Each of the epics are prefaced with explanatory essays to place the story or myth into historical and cultural context.
Bibliography, charts, graphs, maps, illustrations are depicted with extensive captions that serve to provide an informative 'counterpoint' to the main text. The student will benefit from this mode of reiteration to ensure a deeper understanding of this complex material.
Although classical mythology is fascinating and anyone who can speak with an intimate knowledge of it is instantly admired, it remains a complex, confusing and confounding subject. To master it would be quite a feat. This book presents the material in user-friendly and is set out in a logical and simple manner so to render the topic as palatable as is possible.
I read Virgil's Iliad, Homer's Odyssey and Ulysses Travels while still in high school. I'd heard of Oedipus Rex, Paradise Lost, and wondered about the Oracle of Delphi. However, they were all words, so many words, of which I understood little and remember nought. It was enough to be able to recognise the names and nod sagely when senior colleagues spoke of them. I was an imposter.
It was my fervent desire to someday read this classical literature and hopefully understand it. I found this textbook at a book market some years ago. It has sat patiently all this time on my bookshelf, all 1,000 pages of closely typed small print text. Still not easy to read but I'm determined to finally cross it off the 'bucket list'.
The book ends with some wonderful art work that I've had the pleasure of seeing in major art galleries around the world and excerpts from several epic poems, like Dante's Inferno, Milton's Paradise Lost, Tennyson's Ulysses, Yeats' sonnet Leda and the Swan (I always think of Sidney Nolan's wonderful painting of Leda and the Swan that he painted in 1958 and is hung at the National Art Gallery. I never actually knew what that painting was about I just liked it. Now I know, Zeus (king of the gods) is depicted as a swan who seduces Leda.
Text books are boring but it's worth persevering, for anyone wanting to know about Classical Mythology. I'm reading it in stages with breaks inbetween.