A Handbook to the Reception of Classical Mythology presents a collection of essays that explore a wide variety of aspects of Greek and Roman myths and their critical reception from antiquity to the present day. Reveals the importance of mythography to the survival, dissemination, and popularization of classical myth from the ancient world to the present day Features chronologically organized essays that address different sets of myths that were important in each historical era, along with their thematic relevance Features chronologically organized essays that address different sets of myths that were important in each historical era, along with their thematic relevance Offers a series of carefully selected in-depth readings, including both popular and less well-known examples

The Greek myths are characteristically fabulous; they are full of monsters, metamorphoses, and the supernatural. However, they could be told in other ways as well. This volume charts ancient dissatisfaction with the excesses of myth, and the various attempts to cut these stories down to size by explaining them as misunderstood accounts of actual events. In the hands of ancient rationalizers, the hybrid forms of the Centaurs become early horse-riders, seen from a distance; the Minotaur the result of an illicit liaison, not an inter-species love affair; and Cerberus, nothing more than a notorious snake with a lethal bite. Such approaches form an indigenous mode of ancient myth criticism, and show Greeks grappling with the value and utility of their own narrative traditions. Rationalizing interpretations offer an insight into the practical difficulties inherent in distinguishing myth from history in ancient Greece, and indeed the fragmented nature of myth itself as a conceptual entity. By focusing on six Greek authors (Palaephatus, Heraclitus, Excerpta Vaticana, Conon, Plutarch, and Pausanias) and tracing the development of rationalistic interpretation from the fourth century BC to the Second Sophistic (1st-2nd centuries AD) and beyond, Rationalizing Myth in Antiquity shows that, far from being marginalized as it has been in the past, rationalization should be understood as a fundamental component of the pluralistic and shifting network of Greek myth as it was experienced in antiquity.

A recently-published second-century papyrus, P.Oxy. 5283, contains prose summaries (hypotheses) of six plays by the Greek dramatist Euripides, including two lost plays depicting the hero Perseus, Dictys and Danaë. This book demonstrates the significance of this discovery for our understanding of Greek tragedy. After setting out the mythological and dramatic context, and offering a new text and translation based on autopsy, the book analyses the light which the papyrus sheds on these plays, whose narratives, centred on female resistance to abusive male tyrants, speak as powerfully to us today as they did to their original audiences. It then investigates Euripides’ tragic trilogy of 431 BC, which ended with Dictys and began with Medea, whose dramatic power now stands in sharper focus given our improved understanding of the production in which it originally appeared. Finally, it ponders the purpose which these hypotheses served, and why readers in the second century AD should have wanted a summary of plays written more than half a millennium before. All Greek (and Latin) is translated, making the book accessible not just to classicists, but to theatre historians and to anyone interested in Greek literature, drama, and mythology.

This volume is the first to discuss the canon of Pope’s verse in relation to Early British Enlightenment thinking about mythology and mythography. Pope did not merely use classical (along with non-classical) mythology in his verse as a traditional, richly diverse medium through which to represent the diversity of private and civic life in his day, but he was an ambitious translator as well as refashioner of myth. It is a medium that he shapes anew and variously across all his major poems. This volume enhances appreciation of myth as a mode of apprehension as well as expression throughout Pope’s verse. In doing so it illuminates how, in early eighteenth-century Britain, understandings of what myth is and what it does were taking new directions – not least in response to Baconian thought and its legacy.

From Zeus to Europa, to Pan and Prometheus, the myths of ancient Greece and Rome continue to pervade the numerous facets of our existence. The author explores the rich history and varying interpretations of classical myth in both high art and popular culture as well as its ongoing influence in modern society.