Of those two, Hamilton is better at identifying the mainly Greek sources she relied on - it's worth reading her Introduction as to why she preferred gifted Greeks who believed in their gods, heroes and myths to the poetic Romans who rehashed them for "literary" purposes.

Historiadora e tradutora, Hamilton figura hoje entre os clássicos da história da literatura e cultura clássicas.

Though her first book wasn't published until she was in her sixties, her work achieved great popular success. I declared August "History Month" and read, amongst various others, Bulfinch's Mythology of which I was quite disappointed. At home, Hamilton was a recipient of many honorary degrees and awards, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. I was pleased to see the Volsungasaga included, since it is so often replaced by the Nibelungenlied (the Germanic version of Sigfried and his messed up love life), but then as I read it I found to my dismay: "The story of Siegfried is so familiar that that of his Norse prototype Sigurd can be briefly told. Edith Hamilton (1868-1963) was born of American parents in Dresden, Germany, and grew up in Indiana.

I really enjoy reading Mythology and Edith Hamilton’s ‘Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes’ has been no exception. It's time to ask why Hamilton was so extraordinarily thorough with Greek myth (and Roman, while aware that Roman stories are nearly all renamed versions of the Greek tales), and yet she left out so many other myths so much older and so much more important, for example The Epic of Gilgamesh, perhaps the oldest written story on Earth, which relates the story of the historical King of Uruk from Ancient Sumeria (2750-2500 BCE) originally on 12 clay tablets in cunieform script. Then I got to college, and took an actual mythology class, and the first thing the professor said was, "I hope you all haven't been reading junk like Edith Hamilton.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Her father began teaching her Latin when she was seven years old and soon added Greek, French and German to her curriculum. This book tells many myths from lots of different myth systems very well, briefly but in great detail and the commentary isn't overbearing and rle imbues the tellings with a little spark. These were followed by The Prophets of Israel (1936), Witness to the Truth: Christ and His Interpreters (1949), Three Greek Plays, translations of Aeschylus and Euripides (1937), Mythology (1942), The Great Age of Greek Literature (1943), Spokesmen for God (1949) and Echo of Greece (1957).