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The Greek Myths 2

4.21 of 5 stars 4.21 · rating details · 343 ratings · 5 reviews

Robert Graves, classicist, poet, and unorthodox critic, retells the Greek legends of gods and heroes for a modern audience

And, in the two volumes of The Greek Myths, he demonstrates with a dazzling display of relevant knowledge that Greek Mythology is �no more mysterious in content than are modern election cartoons.” His work covers, in nearly two hundred sections, the cr...more

Paperback, 412 pages

Published November 27th 1990 by Penguin Books (first published 1955)

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Sep 26, 2010 Jesse rated it 2 of 5 stars

Concise if somewhat idiosyncratic tellings of the Greek myths, coupled with completely over-the-rainbow analysis that says a lot about Graves and his muse and very little about the myths he's supposed to be discussing. It seems to be an openly acknowledged fact that this fails as a discussion of Greek myths; so the question is, what's the book that does what this book is supposed to do?

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Oct 12, 2011 Rozonda rated it 5 of 5 stars

Hard reading, but exhaustive and enriching.

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Nov 20, 2011 Blue Caeruleus rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: mythology-religion

I got through the first 300 pages of the first volume (not counting the notes that explain the origins of the myths) and didn't bother with the second volume. It's my opinion that this work is better used for reference than as reading material. The myths are recounted flatly, as though the myths are being described for definitions in an encylopoedia. Graves may be something of a scholar, but he's a lowsy story-teller.

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Jul 31, 2012 Richard Alan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Part 2 was as enjoyable as the Vol. 1. I return to it often to read snippits from time to time for pure enjoyment.

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Aug 23, 2008 bluetyson added it

isbn,original

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Jun 17, 2013 GoldGato marked it as patiently-waiting

Shelves: ancient-civilization, mythology, year-round

Jun 17, 2013 Bradley Wyels marked it as to-read

Jun 17, 2013 Shar marked it as to-read

Shelves: library, mythology

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Shelves: z-boxed-9

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Jun 09, 2013 Kevin rated it 5 of 5 stars

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Shelves: non-fiction

Jun 09, 2013 Anidealm rated it 4 of 5 stars

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Shelves: at-home-and-finished

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May 30, 2013 Crystal marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: ancient-old-writers, myths

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May 28, 2013 Ivana rated it 3 of 5 stars

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About Robert Graves

Robert Ranke Graves, born in Wimbledon, received his early education at King's College School and Copthorne Prep School, Wimbledon & Charterhouse School and won a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford. While at Charterhouse in 1912, he fell in love with G. H. Johnstone, a boy of fourteen ("Dick" in Goodbye to All That) When challenged by the headmaster he defended himself by citing Plato, G...more Robert Ranke Graves, born in Wimbledon, received his early education at King's College School and Copthorne Prep School, Wimbledon & Charterhouse School and won a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford. While at Charterhouse in 1912, he fell in love with G. H. Johnstone, a boy of fourteen ("Dick" in Goodbye to All That) When challenged by the headmaster he defended himself by citing Plato, Greek poets, Michelangelo & Shakespeare, "who had felt as I did".
At the outbreak of WWI, Graves enlisted almost immediately, taking a commission in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He published his first volume of poems, Over the Brazier, in 1916. He developed an early reputation as a war poet and was one of the first to write realistic poems about his experience of front line conflict. In later years he omitted war poems from his collections, on the grounds that they were too obviously "part of the war poetry boom". At the Battle of the Somme he was so badly wounded by a shell-fragment through the lung that he was expected to die, and indeed was officially reported as 'died of wounds'. He gradually recovered. Apart from a brief spell back in France, he spent the rest of the war in England.
One of Graves's closest friends at this time was the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who was also an officer in the RWF. In 1917 Sassoon tried to rebel against the war by making a public anti-war statement. Graves, who feared Sassoon could face a court martial, intervened with the military authorities and persuaded them that he was suffering from shell shock, and to treat him accordingly. Graves also suffered from shell shock, or neurasthenia as it is sometimes called, although he was never hospitalised for it.
Biographers document the story well. It is fictionalised in Pat Barker's novel Regeneration. The intensity of their early relationship is nowhere demonstrated more clearly than in Graves's collection Fairies & Fusiliers (1917), which contains a plethora of poems celebrating their friendship. Through Sassoon, he also became friends with Wilfred Owen, whose talent he recognised. Owen attended Graves's wedding to Nancy Nicholson in 1918, presenting him with, as Graves recalled, "a set of 12 Apostle spoons".
Following his marriage and the end of the war, Graves belatedly took up his place at St John's College, Oxford. He later attempted to make a living by running a small shop, but the business failed. In 1926 he took up a post at Cairo University, accompanied by his wife, their children and the poet Laura Riding. He returned to London briefly, where he split with his wife under highly emotional circumstances before leaving to live with Riding in Deià, Majorca. There they continued to publish letterpress books under the rubric of the Seizin Press, founded and edited the literary journal Epilogue, and wrote two successful academic books together: A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928).
In 1927, he published Lawrence and the Arabs, a commercially successful biography of T.E. Lawrence. Good-bye to All That (1929, revised and republished in 1957) proved a success but cost him many of his friends, notably Sassoon. In 1934 he published his most commercially successful work, I, Claudius. Using classical sources he constructed a complexly compelling tale of the life of the Roman emperor Claudius, a tale extended in Claudius the God (1935). Another historical novel by Graves, Count Belisarius (1938), recounts the career of the Byzantine general Belisarius.
During the early 1970s Graves began to suffer from increasingly severe memory loss, and by his eightieth birthday in 1975 he had come to the end of his working life. By 1975 he had published more than 140 works. He survived for ten more years in an increasingly dependent condition until he died from heart failure.(less)

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