Many moons ago I bought myself a copy of The Greek Myths, by Robert Graves. There were several reasons for this. One was that I enjoyed a pilot episode of I, Claudius, so I assumed that the writing on which it was based must have been pretty good. Another reason was that I felt I needed to be more knowledgable about such things. And yet another was that I’d very foolishly joined a mail order book club, and I had to select something from the catalogue before I had the so-called (and hugely expensive) “book of the Month” foisted upon me.

I put it in on my book shelves, where it languished for years, until recently. In 2019 I attended a one day course entitled “Icons and Iconography” at the Bishopsgate Institute in London. The tutor spent a day showing us slides of paintings, and pointing out the references to the Greek Myths embedded within them. He recommended reading Stephen Fry’s books, Mythos and Heroes. That reminded me that I already had Robert Graves’ book, so I determined to read that instead.

Predictably, given all the other reading and writing and working that I’ve been doing, I forgot. But then I met H. She is listening to Mythos, and is finding it both enjoyable and informative. And that rather long-winded tale explains why I finally opened The Greek Myths about a week ago.

Let’s deal with the good points. First, it’s a beautiful edition, as you’d expect from Folio. A luscious cover, high-quality pages, a two-volume set in its own box.

Secondly, the Editor’s Introduction is interesting, and serves to whet one’s appetite for the joys to come.

Unfortunately, they never do. Far be it for me to criticise Robert Graves, but this book is impenetrable. Now, I’ve read impenetrable books before, or tried to. I’m rather proud of the fact that I once managed to read up to page 19 of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital before I had to give up. But I didn’t even get that far with this one.

It reads like an Argos catalogue, but with characters rather than products, and not nearly as interesting. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, and on the subject of Argos, here are the first couple of sentences from the chapter called Argos:

“The parentage and origin of Tantalus are disputed. His mother was Pluto, a daughter of Cronus and Rhea or, some say, of Oceanus and Tethys; and his father either Zeus, or Tmolus, the oak-chapleted deity of Mount Tmolus who, with his wife Omphale, ruled over the kingdom of Lydia and had judged the contest between Pan and Apollo.”

Open any part of the book at random, and every page appears to be full of lists of names like that. Now, being charitable, this would be a great reference work. If you already know the Greek Myths, and know what you want to refresh your memory about, this is the right book for you. It’s logically set out, and has a very comprehensive table of contents. There is even a section at the beginning which deals with the distinction between true myth and non-myths that possibly contain mythic elements. Though again, I think this is probably more useful if you are already familiar with this kind of thing. I’m not.

Until tackling this book, I’d always thought of boredom as a kind of lack, the kind of ennui one might experience while sitting on a train platform at 7pm on a drizzly November evening, where the cafe is closed and the only thing to read is a two day old copy of the Yellow Advertiser. But this book has a dynamic, almost aggressive boredom about it, the kind that grabs hold of your lapels and bashes your head repeatedly against the wall with all these characters, lineages, and stories that disappear under a welter of detail.

As H is intelligent and interesting, and doesn’t appear to have become zombified from reading Mythos, I thought I’d try it. What a difference! I’ve only read the beginning so far, but it got me hooked, and I’ve reserved a copy from my local library. I’ll still keep the Graves book, as a specialist encyclopaedia, but I look forward to the pleasure of learning about these personages and stories in the first instance from Stephen Fry.

The links above are Amazon associate links to the books on Amazon UK.