Bulfinch's Mythology

Thomas Bulfinch was not a Greek professor or an archaeologist. He was a bank clerk in Boston who loved literature and noticed a practical problem: English-speaking readers kept running into classical gods and heroes in poems, plays, and paintings and did not understand half of the references.

His answer was a book for the general public, published in 1855 under the title The Age of Fable, which circulates today as Bulfinch's Mythology. The idea is to tell the main stories clearly, without scholarly show, for people who want to understand an allusion or appreciate a work of art.

That is why the book still works today as a pocket map. Think of the starting point for someone at a museum who has no idea who that woman with an owl beside her is, or of someone who reads a line of verse and stumbles on an unfamiliar name. Here you find the essentials.

Greek mythology begins with Chaos, a formless mass from which Earth and Sky are born. From their union come the Titans, gigantic beings, among them Cronus, who seizes power from his father. Warned that one of his sons will overthrow him, Cronus swallows each child as soon as it is born.

The mother, Rhea, hides the youngest, Zeus, and gives her husband a stone wrapped in cloth. Raised in secret, Zeus grows up, forces his father to give back his brothers and sisters, and leads a long war against the Titans. He wins with the help of the Cyclopes, who give him his thunderbolts.

The plot is simple and harsh: the power that devours its heirs is toppled by one of them. It works as a warning to anyone who thinks they can hold the throne forever, whether in a royal court or in a family business where the founder won't let go of the job.

With the war won, Zeus takes the sky, Poseidon the sea, and Hades the world of the dead. On Mount Olympus lives the divine family: Hera, Zeus's wife and protector of marriage; Athena, of wisdom; Apollo, of music and prophecy; Artemis, of the hunt; Aphrodite, of love; Ares, of war; Hephaestus, of fire and the forge; Hermes, the messenger; Demeter, of the harvests; Dionysus, of wine.

Bulfinch uses the Roman names, which are the ones that reached the Western tradition: Jupiter, Juno, Neptune, Pluto, Minerva, Diana, Venus, Mars, Vulcan, Mercury, Ceres, and Bacchus. For today's reader, this is a curious clue, because those names are on the planets, in the months, and even in the breakfast cereal, which comes from Ceres.

What is striking is how human these gods are: they fight, envy, fall in love, and deceive. For the ancients, a deity was not a synonym for moral perfection but for power. That is why the stories sound more like a family soap opera than a catechism.