Every Myth, Every Variant, Every Source

The Greek Myths appeared in two Pelican volumes in 1955, was revised in 1960, and has circulated since 1992 as a single combined Penguin edition. Its 171 numbered sections traverse the whole corpus: the Pelasgian, Homeric, Orphic, and Olympian creation myths; the five ages of man; the natures and deeds of each Olympian in turn; the hero cycles of Perseus, Bellerophon, Theseus, and Oedipus; the twelve labours of Heracles; the voyage of the Argonauts; the Theban and Trojan cycles; and the returns from Troy, closing with Odysseus’s homecoming. Every section follows a fixed architecture. First the myth is retold as continuous narrative, its paragraphs lettered for reference, with all significant variants woven in or noted. Then comes a numbered list of the classical sources (Homer, Hesiod, the tragedians, Apollodorus, Pausanias, Ovid, the scholiasts and late compilers) keyed to each element of the retelling. Only then follows an explanatory commentary in separately numbered paragraphs, where Graves interprets. The Introduction states the procedure: “My method has been to assemble in harmonious narrative all the scattered elements of each myth, supported by little-known variants which may help to determine the meaning, and to answer all questions that arise, as best I can, in anthropological or historical terms.” The first half of that sentence describes the compilation; the second describes the interpretive apparatus. The two have met different fates, and the page-architecture that separates narrative from sources from commentary is precisely what allows a reader to rely on the one while weighing the other. Graves was candid about the scale of the undertaking: it is, he writes, “much too ambitious a task for any single mythologist to undertake, however long or hard he works,” and “Errors must creep in.” No comparably complete single work has replaced it in English.

Myth as the Record of a Religious Revolution

The Introduction sets out the frame within which the commentaries operate. “True myth,” Graves writes, “may be defined as the reduction to narrative shorthand of ritual mime performed on public festivals,” and he distinguishes it from twelve other things a Greek story can be — philosophical allegory, aetiological explanation, satire, sentimental fable, embroidered history, minstrel romance, political propaganda, moral legend, humorous anecdote, theatrical melodrama, heroic saga, and realistic fiction. Behind the rituals he reconstructs a religious prehistory: “Ancient Europe had no gods. The Great Goddess was regarded as immortal, changeless, and omnipotent; and the concept of fatherhood had not been introduced into religious thought.” The moon’s three phases mirrored her three persons of maiden, nymph, and crone; time was reckoned by lunations; the sacred king reigned by marriage to the tribal Nymph and died at the year’s end. On this reading, “Early Greek mythology is concerned, above all else, with the changing relations between the queen and her lovers,” from the yearly sacrifice of the king down to the eclipse of queenship by unlimited male monarchy after the Hellenic, Achaean, and Dorian invasions. Hence Graves’s summary claim that “A large part of Greek myth is politico-religious history.” Perseus beheading Medusa records the Hellenes overrunning the goddess’s shrines and stripping her priestesses of their prophylactic Gorgon masks; Apollo’s destruction of the Python at Delphi records the Achaean capture of the Earth-goddess’s shrine; the Olympian family itself is a negotiated compromise between Hellenic and pre-Hellenic cult, with Hera’s subservience to Zeus marking the settlement’s final terms. The commentaries apply this template myth by myth across the entire book.

Iconotropy and the Status of the Apparatus

The most distinctive instrument in the apparatus is a term of Graves’s own coinage. Where a myth seems baffling, he argues, it is often because “the mythographer has accidentally or deliberately misinterpreted a sacred picture or dramatic rite. I have called such a process ‘iconotropy’” — the reading of an older sacred image through later, usually patriarchal, eyes. The Judgement of Paris is his showpiece: the three goddesses are one goddess in triad, and Aphrodite is presenting Paris with the apple rather than receiving it from him. The device is ingenious, and it explains almost anything, which is its difficulty: the sacred pictures it appeals to rarely survive to be checked. Here the book’s intellectual status must be stated plainly. As a compilation, its retellings and source-citations are authoritative and remain the standard English reference. As interpretation, the matriarchal prehistory, the Triple-goddess as historical institution, and iconotropy as a general key are Graves’s own contested theses, developed out of The White Goddess and never accepted by mainstream classical scholarship as established history. Graves himself supplies the caveat: “Let me emphasize that any statement here made about Mediterranean religion or ritual before the appearance of written records is conjectural.” The 1960 Foreword shows both how far his speculation could run and how he handled it: having come to believe that “‘ambrosia’ and ‘nectar’ were intoxicant mushrooms,” and that Maenadic frenzy was fungal rather than alcoholic, he nevertheless concludes that “These theories call for further research, and I have therefore not incorporated my findings in the text of the present edition.” The notes are hypothesis, offered by a poet doing anthropology; the narratives are evidence, assembled by a scholar of formidable range. The book’s own structure keeps the two apart.

Graves Against the Consulting-Room

Readers arriving from the depth-psychological tradition should know that Graves built the book partly against them. The Introduction declares that the theory treating Chimaera, Sphinx, Gorgon, and Centaur as “blind uprushes of the Jungian collective unconscious” is “demonstrably unsound,” insists that “The Bronze and early Iron Ages in Greece were not the childhood of mankind, as Dr Jung suggests,” and concludes that “A true science of myth should begin with a study of archaeology, history, and comparative religion, not in the psycho-therapist’s consulting-room.” Zeus swallowing Metis and bearing Athene from his head is, for Graves, not an irrepressible fantasy but a theological dogma encoding three stages of cult-suppression and compromise. The polemic deserves to be taken seriously rather than resented, for it names a real danger: archetypal reading can float free of the ancient evidence. Yet there is a structural irony. Graves’s own method is as thoroughly interpretive as the one he rejects, since both treat the surviving narrative as the deformation of something prior — ritual practice in his case, archetypal pattern in the Jungian one. And the analytic practice of amplification requires exactly what Graves assembled: the complete record of variants, with sources, for every figure in the corpus. This is why the book sits on analysts’ shelves. An amplification of Medusa, Persephone, or Heracles that has not been checked against Graves’s variants and citations is an amplification resting on a half-remembered version of the myth.

How the Book Stands on This Shelf

Within this library, The Greek Myths functions as the mythographic reference against which its neighbours can be read. The White Goddess is its theoretical companion, the book in which the Triple-goddess argument receives full statement and where Graves the poet openly leads Graves the anthropologist. Kerényi’s Dionysos and Prometheus model the alternative Graves dismissed too quickly: religious-historical scholarship on single figures that remains archaeologically grounded while staying open to the psyche. Jung and Kerényi’s Essays on a Science of Mythology is the direct antagonist text, the statement of the archetypal position the Introduction attacks. Edinger’s The Psyche in Antiquity carries that psychological reading of the Greek material into explicit analytic use, and Thompson’s The Folktale is the parallel mid-century enterprise of organizing traditional narrative by motif and variant rather than by theory. The working rule for the whole cluster is the one Graves’s own page-layout teaches: take the retellings and the sources as the common ground every interpretation must answer to, and take each interpretive apparatus, his included, as a hypothesis about what the ground means.