Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined (Stephen Fry's Great Mythology, #2)

by Stephen Fry

Myth is not history. Variant tellings and narrative lines are inevitable. I have tried where possible to give some overarching shape to the stories of the heroes whose lives and deaths I have told here, but chronological incongruities are bound to make themselves manifest. Apollodorus’s Bibliotheca (Library) is a major source for all Greek myth, though he is often at variance with Hesiod and Homer. Apollonius Rhodius wrote the Argonautica, from which most of the details of Jason’s great voyage in search of the Golden Fleece are derived. The Roman writers Hyginus and Ovid embroider and elaborate in their way, and the travelers and geographers Pausanias and Strabo in theirs. The heroes, however, more than the gods, nymphs, or other mortals, live on in the works of the three great Athenian tragedians, Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles. They embellish and alter the myths it is true, but as playwrights their interest lay in dramatic truth and a focus on characters in crisis. Sophocles’s Theban Cycle is the source for the most commonly told versions of the tragic story of Oedipus and his family. Euripides enters the hearth and home of Jason, Theseus, and Heracles, and concentrates on the women in their lives. Aeschylus comes into his own later, outside the parameters of this volume. I have plundered a great deal from all three of these great contemporaries and rivals.

Heroes By Stephen Fry