It makes me want to read The Odyssey and Iliad, The Aeneid, Medea, and Oedipus Rex, at the least, because no matter how dry you tell it, there is real imagination and juiciness to the tales. So, as is always true when an author is telling and not showing, it’s a bit dry, especially concerning the subject matter (though she does reserve the right to occasionally be sarcastic or even humorous).īut it’s special because it is a cohesive, somewhat comprehensive, and clear retelling of the many stories of gods and heroes of ancient Greece and Rome. Her job is to present them as translations of excerpts, combining excerpts to give us a complete picture of the story/character (many times reminding us that this picture is reliant on what stories actually survived and from what time period). She’s not going to embellish them: this is not her job. Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, Herodotus, Plato, etc.), laid out in a scholarly and comprehensive way. So you cover stories and characters from a number of the most important texts that remain of Greek and Roman mythology (ie. But Hamilton’s portrayal of it? Well, it’s less of a portrayal and more of an encyclopedia. Not that Greek and Roman mythology isn’t still super interesting. We have already moved on through Norse mythology and on to African and Egyptian mythology. So, being the still closet nerdy teacher that I am, I decided to read Mythology the week we were covering it in class. Since they are both marked up, it is an instance where I don’t want to get rid of either. We have two copies of Mythology in our house-one from high school and one that I picked up along the way from a relative who was downsizing. (Yes, we are moving fast, doing more of a comparative mythology than an in-depth study.) I like to bring other sources (the main one being Gods and Heroes by Korwin Briggs) to class to do a bit of a show ‘n’ tell and I also love inundating my students with suggested viewing and reading related to our current studies. Our first week of mythology covered Greek and Roman mythology. We are in our first unit, which is mythology. I am currently teaching a ninth grade English class. And it all came across a little bit like personality types in the decades before Meyers-Briggs and Enneagram would take the kids of the 80s by storm. R-rated stories masquerading as historical text about the roots of literature and story-telling. My friends and I nicknamed each other from the Greek pantheon. Either way, closet nerd that I am, Mythology sparked a number of extracurricular exploits, or at least flourished them.

It is unlikely that I read the entire thing, since it can be assigned in pieces and that is probably what my teacher did. I first read Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes by Edith Hamilton when I was in high school.

Mythology bobok