Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome by E. M. Berens: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome
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The ancient Greeks had several different theories with regard to the origin of the world, but the generally accepted notion was that before this world came into existence, there was in its place a confused mass of shapeless elements called Chaos. These elements becoming at length consolidated (by what means does not appear), resolved themselves into two widely different substances, the lighter portion of which, soaring on high, formed the sky or firmament, and constituted itself into a vast, overarching vault, which protected the firm and solid mass beneath.
Thus came into being the two first great primeval deities of the Greeks, Uranus and Ge or Gæa.
Uranus, the more refined deity, represented the light and air of heaven, possessing the distinguishing qualities of light, heat, purity, and omnipresence, whilst Gæa, the firm, flat,[1] life-sustaining earth, was worshipped as the great all-nourishing mother. Her many titles refer to her more or less in this character, and she appears to have been universally revered among the Greeks, there being scarcely a city in Greece which did not contain a temple erected in her honour; indeed Gæa was held in such veneration that her name was always invoked whenever the gods took a solemn oath, made an emphatic declaration, or implored assistance.
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Berens starts with the genealogy and never quite leaves it. Chaos gives way to Uranus and Gæa; their children are the Titans, the Cyclopes and the Giants; Cronus mutilates his father, swallows his own children and loses the war that follows. After the world is divided by lot the book takes the third dynasty one deity at a time, giving each a pedigree, an office, a set of symbols and a note on how sculptors and painters showed them. Nothing is argued and almost nothing is cited: the entries are short enough to be read at a sitting, and the eagle, the owl, the peacock and the trident do most of the characterisation.
The second half is the legends, and it is the better half. Cadmus founds Thebes from a dragon’s teeth, Perseus cuts off Medusa’s head, Jason sails to Colchis, Heracles serves Eurystheus, Theseus clears the road to Athens, and the last hundred pages follow the siege of Troy and the quarrels of the men who came home from it. Berens keeps the ugly episodes as well as the noble ones, and he lets the gods be petty. See Wikipedia’s overview of classical mythology for the wider system and the ancient sources behind it. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #22381.
Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome by E. M. Berens: Summary, Characters & Themes
This page is a summary and analysis of Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome, the handbook E. M. Berens published in New York in 1880. It runs to 109,063 words and falls into two unequal parts: a catalogue of the gods with their attributes, and a sequence of hero legends from Cadmus to the return of the Greeks from Troy. Just over half is the gods, about a third the hero legends, and a short pronouncing index closes the volume. The title promises Greece and Rome, and Rome is present, but as a second layer: Latin names in brackets on nearly every heading, and a separate section for the Italian gods who were never equated with a Greek one. The prose is plain, dated and free of apparatus, with no footnotes, no bibliography and almost no citations. For the wider field see Wikipedia’s article on Greek mythology.
Berens does not footnote. Where a source is named at all it appears in the body of the sentence: Hesiod for the ages of the world, Homer for a detail of costume, Ovid twice, once for the cave of Sleep and once for Pomona in her orchard. Virgil is never mentioned, which is a strange omission in a book that spends a whole section on Roman religion. The effect is a smooth consecutive account with the seams between sources planed away. That helps a beginner and misleads anyone who wants to know where a story comes from. Where the stories contradict each other he usually picks one and moves on, though now and then two survive side by side: Adonis spends four months in each of three places in one paragraph, and six months with Aphrodite and six with Persephone in the next. He is also fond of the phrase ‘it is said’, which carries the whole problem of the sources in three words.
The book belongs to the great age of the American school handbook. Maynard, Merrill and Company, at 43 and 45 East Tenth Street, issued it as a class text, and the preface says plainly what it is for: pupils in advanced schools who need the myths as background for their reading of the poets. It also insists that no passage could offend a young reader, a claim the contents quietly test. Semele is burnt to ash, Actaeon is torn apart by his own dogs, and the gods are jealous, acquisitive and violent from the first page to the last. The plates promised on the title page, engraved from antique sculpture, are not in the Gutenberg transcription, which carries the letterpress only. The preface is addressed to teachers rather than to pupils, and it asks them to judge the book by what it leaves out as much as by what it includes.
What keeps the book useful is the attention to cult. Berens describes temples as treasuries and as places of asylum, the sacred precinct and the altar, the staff of priests and priestesses, sacrifice, and the augur with his staff reading the flight of birds. He lists the oracles and the calendar of festivals: the Eleusinian mysteries held every five years, the Thesmophoria, the Panathenæa, the Saturnalia in December, the Vestalia on 9 June, the Robigalia on 25 April. Myth, on this account, is something cities did as well as something poets told, and the Roman material is treated as a religion with its own logic rather than as a set of translations. The transcription behind this page is at Project Gutenberg #22381.
Two things are missing. There is no Orion and no Pyramus, and the private lives of the gods get less room than the heroic legends: the book gives you Zeus’s eagle and Hera’s peacock but not, at any length, what the couple did to each other. The Roman section, by contrast, is unexpectedly good, because the Italian gods are taken seriously as separate deities, Janus of the double face, Pomona of the orchard, Terminus the boundary stone, rather than as labels. Readers who want the Greek material in narrative form can go to the Iliad or the Odyssey on this site; readers who want the same treatment of a non-European pantheon can try our edition of Chinese myths and legends. For Latin poetry the Roman sections are a useful corrective to the habit of reading Jupiter as Zeus in a toga.
Historical Context
The 1880s were the high point of the classical handbook in the United States. Latin and Greek were still entrance requirements at the better colleges, and a pupil who met a name in a poem was expected to know the story behind it. Thomas Bulfinch had shown in 1855 that the material could be sold to a general readership, and a crowd of schoolbooks followed, of which this is one. Their shared method was to reduce the myths to short entries, strip out the variants, and present the gods as characters with fixed attributes and a settled iconography. The handbooks were cheap, portable and illustrated, and they were bought in class sets rather than by individual readers, which is why their prose is so even and so unmemorable.
Berens inherits that method and improves on it in one respect: he keeps the Roman stratum visible instead of pretending that Jupiter is only another word for Zeus. The section on the Italian divinities, the temples and the festival calendar is the part of the book that reads least like a digest, and it notices what the Greek material cannot supply, a year organised around agricultural dates and a civic priesthood with a budget. It is also the part that has aged best, because it treats religion as an institution with a timetable. Roman religion, in other words, is treated as religion, not as allegory waiting to be decoded.
None of this is scholarship by modern standards. The etymologies are guesses, the chronology is arranged for convenience, and the moralising asides belong to their century. What survives is the shape of the thing: a complete, orderly walk from Chaos to the sack of Troy, with the names in both languages and an index that tells you how to pronounce them. As a first map of a large territory it still works, and the plainness that makes it dull as literature makes it clear as a reference. It is a book to be used rather than admired. The reader who wants the arguments and the evidence will need a modern companion; the reader who wants to know what happens next will find this more useful than most of them.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- Zeus: The sky, the law, the state and the family, in that order, before the book gets to his marriages. He has seven immortal wives and a long list of mortal loves; his oracle is at Dodona, where priests read the rustle of an oak, and his greatest statue, by Phidias at Olympia, was forty feet of ivory and gold under a roof opened to the sky. White bulls, cows and goats were sacrificed to him and the oak was sacred. The Roman Jupiter, Berens notes, never appears on earth.
- Hera: The injured wife, and the book does not soften her. Her sanctuaries at Argos and Samos were older than Zeus’s, her festival included a foot race for maidens and a robe woven by sixteen women of Elis, and she persecuted Leto, Io, Semele, Alcmene and Heracles in turn. Her children are Ares, Hephaestus, Hebe and Eileithyia. The peacock and the cuckoo on her sceptre are hers; the Roman Juno kept the temple where the state stored its money, which is where the word mint comes from.
- Pallas-Athene: Born out of her father’s skull in full armour after Hephaestus opened it with an axe, and goddess of weaving and shipbuilding as much as of war. The contest with Arachne is told at length and with an unusual ending: the mortal girl wins, the goddess strikes her, and Athene turns the body into a spider. Her bird is the owl, the cock was sacred to her, and her contest with Poseidon for Attica, the olive against the horse, fixes her at Athens, where the Panathenæa was held in her honour.
- Apollo: The most fully drawn of the Olympians: born on Delos under a palm, fed on nectar, killing the serpent Python and taking Delphi for his own. Berens follows a run of unsuccessful loves, Daphne into a laurel, Cassandra into prophecy that nobody believes, Hyacinthus killed by a discus, and the punishments dealt out to Niobe and to Marsyas the satyr, who is flayed alive for challenging the god to a musical contest. The wolf, the dolphin and the hawk are his animals, the laurel his tree, and the Roman Apollo is identical in both pantheons.
- Heracles: The book gives him more space than any other figure and refuses to number the labours at twelve. It works through them in order under Eurystheus, from the lion of Nemea and the Hydra to the apples of the Hesperides and Cerberus, with the smaller exploits fitted in between. His club and the lion’s skin are the equipment of every later picture. The death is told plainly: the shirt of Nessus, the poison, and the pyre. The Roman Hercules inherits the whole cycle, altar and all.
- Odysseus: The one hero the book follows home. His pedigree, his reluctance, the embassy to Troy, the wooden horse, the ten years of wandering, Calypso and Circe, the Phæacians and the bow in the hall at Ithaca are all here, though the return takes fewer pages than the siege. Athene arranges his disguise as a beggar for the last act, and the swineherd Eumæus is the first man he trusts. Berens uses the Greek name throughout and lets Ulysses appear only twice, as a reminder that the Latin tradition runs through the same story.
Core Literary Themes
- Genealogy as structure: The book is organised by descent and not by theme, chronology or drama. Chaos produces Uranus, Uranus produces Cronus, Cronus produces Zeus, and every later story is placed by parentage: Athene’s birth is a footnote to Zeus’s headache, and the wars of the heroes descend from his affairs. The method makes the whole corpus look like one family tree, which is exactly what a schoolbook needed it to look like, and it has a cost: the stories that do not fit a pedigree, the local cults and the monsters, are pushed to the margins or omitted altogether.
- Two names for every god: Nearly every heading carries the Greek name first and the Latin equivalent in brackets, and the habit is more than editorial. Berens explains that the Romans often adopted a Greek god wholesale, then points out the cases where they did not, so the brackets become a lesson in how one culture rewrites another. By the end of the book the double names are a reading habit rather than a translation aid, and the reader can move between Homer and Virgil without losing the thread. The Roman section goes further and gives the Italian gods a separate calendar, which no glossary can do.
- Myth as civic practice: The sections on temples, priests, sacrifice, oracles and festivals treat religion as something a city does. Delphi and Dodona are institutions with staff and procedure, the Eleusinian mysteries are held on a fixed cycle, the Vestalia has a date and a menu, and the year is divided among the gods by calendar. This is the part of the book that turns a collection of adventures into a description of ancient life, and it is why the handbook was useful in a classroom where the poems were read as literature and the religion had to be explained separately.
- The hero as a job: Perseus, Cadmus, Jason, Heracles and Theseus are defined by tasks rather than by character. They clear monsters, found cities, fetch objects and serve kings; Heracles is literally an employee of Eurystheus for twelve years. The pattern makes the legends repetitive, and Berens does not hide it: the interest lies in the variations, in which monster, which city, which god takes an interest, and which of the heroes fails to come home. Character is what the pattern cannot supply, and the book does not try to supply it. The book’s own sympathy is with the ones who come home, which is why the last pages are about Odysseus.
- The schoolroom compromise: The preface promises a book that will not corrupt the young, and the text keeps that promise by shortening, euphemism and omission. Semele is visited by Zeus and destroyed, the gods’ affairs are called unions, and the violence is described briskly. The result is a book that is pious and lurid at the same time, careful with Semele and careless with Marsyas, and the tension between the two is the most nineteenth-century thing about it. That is the compromise: enough incident to be useful, enough reticence to be safe in a schoolroom.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome?
Because it is a map rather than a retelling. A reader who meets a name in Homer or in Ovid can look it up here and find the parentage, the office, the animal and the city in a single paragraph. The entries are short, the order is genealogical, and the index gives the pronunciation, which is more than most modern companions bother to do. It is the fastest way to place a name that a poem assumes you already know. The entries can be read in any order, which is the point of a handbook. The complete text is free at Project Gutenberg #22381.
Because it takes the Roman side seriously. Most handbooks of the period treat the Latin names as a glossary. Berens gives the Italian gods their own section, with Janus, Pomona, Terminus and the Lares, and then describes the temples, the priesthood and the festival calendar as Roman institutions with dates and duties. It is the shortest route I know to the religion behind the Aeneid, and it explains why the Roman year looks nothing like the Greek one.
Because the legends are complete. The book runs without a gap from Cadmus to the returns from Troy, and it includes the stories that children’s versions leave out: the Epigoni, the Heraclidæ, the quarrel of the Atreidæ, the deaths of the suitors. Read end to end it gives the whole cycle, and read in pieces it gives any single episode with its context attached. Very few books of this age do both.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #22381 the complete text, unabridged, with the section headings and the index of proper names.
- Both names on every heading the Greek name comes first and the Latin equivalent follows in brackets, so the book can be used beside Latin poetry without a second glossary.
- No chapter numbers, no apparatus the text runs from dynasty to dynasty under its own headings, so the summaries here follow the book’s order rather than an invented numbering.
- A pronouncing index is included proper names are syllabified and stressed, which matters when the next thing you read is hexameter.
- The Iliad — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Divine Comedy — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Odyssey — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The book has no numbered chapters. It runs from the first dynasty to the fall of Troy under its own section headings, and the twelve summaries below follow those headings in order.
- Origin of the World: The book opens with a genealogy, not a creation story. Chaos is a shapeless confusion of earth, air and fire; light separates, and Uranus and Gæa produce the Titans, the Cyclopes and the Giants. Uranus is mutilated, Cronus swallows his children and is given a stone instead, and Zeus grows up in a Cretan cave while the Curetes clash their shields to hide the noise. The section ends with the war in Thessaly, the division of the world by lot, and a short section on theories of human origin, which Berens lists and leaves open.
- Zeus and Hera: Zeus is described four ways, as sky, as natural law, as patron of the state and as father of gods and men, before the book reaches his marriages. There follows the list of seven immortal wives, the birth of Athene from his opened skull, the mortal women he visited, and the note that the Roman Jupiter never appears on earth. Hera gets her own entry, with the golden apple, the peacock, the old sanctuaries at Argos and Samos, and the state treasury kept in her temple.
- Athene, Themis and Hestia: Athene is born in armour and turns out to be the goddess of weaving and shipbuilding as much as of war; the contest with Arachne, which the mortal wins, ends with the girl turned into a spider. Themis holds the scales and the sword and speaks at an oracle by the Cephissus. Hestia keeps the hearth, the public fire in the council house, and the round temple at Rome where the Palladium was stored, tended by the Vestal Virgins, whose festival fell on 9 June.
- Demeter and Aphrodite: Demeter is the corn and the crust of the earth, and her entry is really the story of Persephone: the narcissus with a hundred blossoms, the four black horses, the nine days of torchlight, the pomegranate seeds and the compromise that gives the world its seasons. The Eleusinian mysteries follow from it, held every five years and walked by torchlight. Aphrodite’s entry covers her birth from the sea, her girdle, Adonis’ divided year, and the Roman Venus, who is the same goddess under a name the book treats as exact.
- Helios, Eos and Apollo: Helios drives four fire-breathing horses and crosses the sky in a golden cup; his son Phaethon takes the chariot out and dies, and his sisters turn into poplars that weep amber. Eos carries off Tithonus and wins him immortality without youth, so that he shrivels into a grasshopper. Apollo’s entry is the longest of the three, and it is where the book’s storytelling is at its best: Delos, the Python, Delphi, Daphne, Hyacinthus, Niobe, Marsyas and Cassandra, each told in a few sentences and left to do its work.
- Hecate, Selene, Artemis and Hephæstus: Hecate keeps the crossroads and the moonless night; Selene loves the sleeping shepherd Endymion; Artemis is the hunt and the sudden death, and turns Actaeon into a stag to be torn by his own dogs. Hephaestus, thrown from Olympus, works at the forge with the Cyclopes, is married to Aphrodite and is the god of the craftsman’s fire. The Roman Vulcan keeps the same workshop, gets a festival in August, and is shown at the anvil rather than in armour.
- Poseidon, Ares and Hermes: Poseidon’s trident, his quarrel with Athene over Attica, and the sea divinities around him, Nereus, Proteus, the Tritons and the Sirens, open the section. Ares follows, disliked by everyone, and Nike, who is a wing rather than a person. Hermes closes it: born in an Arcadian cave, he steals Apollo’s cattle on the day of his birth, invents the lyre from a tortoise shell, and conducts the dead. The Roman Mercury takes over the winged sandals, the caduceus and the trade in messages.
- Dionysus, Aïdes and the minor divinities: Dionysus is the vine, the madness and the theatre; his entry has the pirates turned into dolphins and Ariadne on Naxos. Aïdes rules the underworld, with Charon’s obol, the three-headed dog and the meadows of Elysium on the right hand. The rest of the section is a long list of minor powers: the Muses, the Graces, Pan, the nymphs, the winds, and Eros with Psyche, whose story is told at greater length than most of the Olympians get.
- Roman divinities, worship and festivals: Berens separates the Italian gods from the Greek ones. Janus of the double face opens the year and the temple gates in wartime; Faunus, Pomona, Vertumnus, Terminus and Pales belong to fields and boundaries; the Lares and Penates to the house. The same section describes temples, priests, sacrifices, oracles and the festival calendar, from the Eleusinian mysteries to the Saturnalia, and closes with the Roman festivals and their dates.
- Cadmus, Perseus and Dædalus: Cadmus goes looking for Europa and founds Thebes by following a heifer and sowing a dragon’s teeth. Perseus is shut in a chest with his mother, cuts off Medusa’s head using a shield as a mirror, and rescues Andromeda from the sea monster. Ion is the exposed child of Apollo and Creusa, and Dædalus builds the labyrinth, the wooden cow and the wings that kill his son. These are the founding stories: one city, one hero, one craftsman, each with a god somewhere in the family.
- The Golden Fleece and Pelops: The fleece belongs to a ram that carried Phryxus and Helle over the sea, and Jason has to fetch it from Colchis. Berens gives the full voyage, the women of Lemnos, the Harpies, the clashing rocks, and then Medea’s revenge at Iolcus. Pelops, the son of Tantalus, wins Hippodamia in a chariot race on the coast of Elis and gives his name to the peninsula. The two stories are the hinge between the gods and the dynasties that will fight at Troy.
- Heracles, Bellerophon, Theseus and Troy: Heracles gets the most space. The book does not number the labours at twelve, but works through them in order under Eurystheus, from the lion of Nemea to Cerberus, and ends with the shirt of Nessus and the pyre. Bellerophon rides Pegasus against the Chimæra and falls when he tries to reach Olympus. Theseus clears the road to Athens and loses Ariadne on Naxos; Œdipus answers the Sphinx and blinds himself; the last pages are the war at Troy, the wooden horse and the returns of the Greek leaders.
Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome: Frequently Asked Questions
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