(fl. c. AD 100) also gave us versions of the stories. Other sources are the odes of Pindar
(c. 502–446 BC) and the Greek dramatists, Sophocles (born c.496 BC) and Euripides
(born c.480 BC) as well as the Metamorphoses of the Roman poet, Ovid in the first
century BC. Many of the common myths have been pieced together from several sources
—fragments of poems and references in plays—and there are variant versions, even
among the writers of the ancient world, as detailed by Robert Graves in The Greek Myths.
Yet when they are retold faithfully the Greek tales are staggering in their imaginative
power and psychological insight and are always intensely dramatic. Lillian Smith (1953:
66) has said that ‘to read them is to experience the wonder of the morning of the world’.
It is also to experience the aspirations, joys, terrors, defeats, triumphs and the creative
energy of humankind throughout the ages.
As few today can read ancient Greek we are dependent on translations such as those
of E.V.Rieu, whose Iliad and Odyssey would seem to capture the swift stateliness of
Homer’s narration along with the detail of everyday life in ancient Greece. For young
readers there is poetry and dignity as well as swift narrative action in Rosemary
Sutcliff’s The Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of the Iliad (1993), combining as it does,
the drama of human emotion and that of a ferocious naval and military campaign. Alan
Lee’s universal ‘Greek’ style illustrations both here and in Sutcliff’s The Wanderings of
Odysseus (1994) harmoniously complement the text; and with the ‘picture story’ format
of the book add tremendously to the reader appeal. Remarkably, most retellings of the
Odyssey including that of Barbara Leonie Picard for the Oxford Myths and Legends
series retain a third person narrative throughout. In Homer, however, when Odysseus in
Part II is presented to Alcinous, King of Phaecia the hero narrates in the first person his
adventures from his imprisonment on Calypso’s isle to his arrival at the palace of
Alcinous. One of the few recent children’s versions to retain this structure is by Robin
Lister (1987). Lister and his illustrator, Alan Baker have collaborated successfully here
and in The Story of King Arthur (1988) to produce eye-catching illustrations and
euphonious texts of two of the world’s most potent stories.
One of the first to recognise the literary merit of the Greek tales for children was
Nathaniel Hawthorne. In A Wonder Book (1851) he retells them in lush but vivid prose,
treating them more as fairy tales than as high drama. He adds his own detail, giving
Midas a daughter whom he calls Marygold and who is turned into gold by her father
along with everything else he touches.
Hawthorne’s cavalier treatment of the text motivated Charles Kingsley to restore the
purity of the tales. In his introduction to The Heroes (1856) Kingsley wrote, ‘Now, I love
these old Hellens heartily’, and so proclaimed his enthusiasm for the language as well as
the story. His version is lofty in idealism yet homely in detail, poetic in expression yet
dramatic in action. The stories as he tells them reflect his belief that we ‘call it a “heroic”
thing to suffer pain and grief, that we may do good to our fellow men’.
Later Padraic Colum in The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived before Achilles
(1921) used the technique of having Orpheus sing the stories to the heroes as they
sailed in search of the golden fleece. His retelling is poetic and full of wonder. Yet he is
not in awe of the gods, but treats them with familiar respect.
Since Hawthorne, Kingsley and Colum versions of the Greek stories have proliferated.
For the reteller it is easy to seize upon a tailor-made story and recount it in facile, easily
168 MYTH AND LEGEND