30 THE MYTHS OF CREATION: THE GODS
Sir George Young (1837-1930), for example, may be a bit more difficult for mod-
ern readers than they bargained for; yet the series includes the acceptable Medea
by Rex Warner. The free translations of The Oresteia and of Ovid's Metamorphoses
by the distinguished poet Ted Hughes stand as exceptional reinterpretations but
can hardly serve as the basis for determining what Sophocles actually said—a
vital concern for the student of mythology. Robert Fagles and Stanley Lombardo
are, each in his own very different way, commendable translators for today's
audiences, although one should be aware of the interpretative liberties they take
as they impose their will upon a text. In the case of Homer, Richmond Lattimore
wins the crown for his most faithful and poetic transmission of Homer's Iliad.
Caveat emptor! Oxford University Press offers in its series Oxford World's Clas-
sics attractive paperback volumes of good translations of many works that might
supplement our text, among them Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days, trans-
lated by M. L. West, and Sophocles' Antigone, Oedipus the King, and Electra, trans-
lated by H. D. F. Kitto; other translations include Homer's Odyssey, Apollodorus'
The Library of Greek Mythology, and Euripides, Bacchae, Iphigenia among the Tauri-
ans, Iphigenia at Aulis, and Rhesus (translated by James Morwood).
The translations presented in this book are our own, and we attempt to of-
fer accurate and accessible versions for the reader who knows no Greek or Latin
and wants to come as close as possible to the original sources.SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND TEACHING
O'Connor, J. F., and Rowland, R. J. Teaching Classical Mythology, Education Papers 5.
New York: American Philological Association, 1987. An extremely helpful collection
of opinions about content and method with significant bibliography.
Peradotto, John. Classical Mythology: An Annotated Bibliographical Survey. Urbana: Amer-
ican Philological Association, 1973. A valuable and inexpensive guide in which the
subject is neatly categorized and books are evaluated; one must look elsewhere for
updated bibliography.INTERPRETATION, ANALYSIS, AND COMPARATIVE STUDIES
Anderson, Graham. Fairytale in the Ancient World. London and New York: Routledge,
2000.
Bremmer, J., ed. Interpretations of Greek Mythology. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1986; Lon-
don: Routledge, 1988. A collection of essays.
Burkert, Walter. Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1979; paperback, 1982. By far the best explanation of the signifi-
cance of structural theories.
Buxton, R. G. A. Imaginary Greece: The Contexts of Mythology. New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1994. An introduction, with emphasis on social contexts in which Greek
myth was narrated.
Calasso, Roberto. The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.