When I was little, my main source of Greek mythology was Edith Hamilton's Mythology, which contained Greek, Roman, and Norse tales. The book is mostly comprised of retellings of Greco-Roman myths, with a hilariously small section for Norse myths at the back. I read it cover to cover when I was little. I especially loved the little love stories, such as that of Cupid and Psyche and of Pomona and Vertumnus.
The book is on archive.org now, thankfully, allowing me to relive my long, long mythology phase.
"Greek mythology is largely made up of stories about gods and goddesses, but it must not be read as a kind of Greek Bible, an account of the Greek religion. According to the most modern idea, a real myth has nothing to do with religion. It is an explanation of something in nature; how, for instance, any and everything in the universe came into existence: men, animals, this or that tree or flower, the sun, the moon, the stars, storms, eruptions, earthquakes, all that is and all that happens... Myths are early science, the result of men's first trying to explain what they saw around them. But there are many so-called myths which explain nothing at all... This fact is now generally accepted; and we do not have to try to find in every mythological heroine the moon or the dawn and in every hero's life a sun myth. The stories are early literature as well as early science." (19)
Hamilton makes a lot of claims in this introduction. Her rather xenophobic assertion that the Greeks were basically the first rational beings on the planet sets the tone for the time period. And although indeed one probably should not compare a compilation of miscellaneous stories to the Bible, which was claimed by scholars of the religion to be entirely true despite its contradictions, this paragraph kind of downplays that yeah, what we think of as Greek mythology was in no little part Greek religion. I'm no scholar, but I can probably tell you that the story of the founding of Athens was, at least officially, thought to be reality. Was everyone taking the story of Acis and Galatea to be fact? I don't know. But the gods were indeed worshiped!
Who knows. Again, I'm not a scholar. Hamilton does go on to address the evolution of Zeus as a worshiped god, and how his characterization evolved over time.
Looking again at the introduction, I'm remembering what Hamilton taught me about the Greek versus the Roman writers.
"Most of the books about the stories of classical mythology depend chiefly upon the Latin poet Ovid, who wrote during the reign of Augustus. Ovid is a compendium of mythology. No ancient writer can compare with him in this respect. He told almost all the stories and he told them at great length. Occasionally stories familiar to us through literature and art have come down to us only in his pages. In this book I have avoided using him as far as possible. Undoubtedly he was a good poet and a good storyteller and able to appreciate the myths enough to realize what excellent material they offered him; but he was really farther away from them in his point of view than we are today. They were sheer nonsense to him...
He says in effect to his reader, “Never mind how silly they are. I will dress them up so prettily for you that you will like them." And he does, often very prettily indeed, but in his hands the stories which were factual truth and solemn truth to the early Greek poets Hesiod and Pindar, and vehicles of deep religious truth to the Greek tragedians, become idle tales, sometimes witty and diverting, often sentimental and distressingly rhetorical. The Greek mythologists are not rhetoricians and are notably free from sentimentality." (21)
What an approach! Being born the same year as the death of Thomas Bulfinch, who retold even Greek myths with Latin names for the gods! Writing after all the operas and plays based on stories from Ovid!
And it seriously biased me against the Romans. The Greek mythological revival of the 2010s did seem to ignore Rome as well, although I will always hold that my favorite love story of Cupid and Psyche is in fact originally Roman. (I did hear once it was based on an old Greek story, but I am not sure.)
"It was a simple matter to adopt the Greek gods because the Romans did not have definitely personified gods of their own. They were a people of deep religious feeling, but they had little imagination, They could never have created the Olympians, each a distinct, vivid personality. Their gods, before they took over from the Greeks, were vague, hardly more than a 'those that are above.'" (44)
Like hello? The shade?
Anyway, stay tuned for my opinion on some fucked-up myths, including Cephalus and Procris, subjects of the Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre opera "Cephale et Procris".