John Talbot
Don’t even bother with Thomas Bulfinch’s The Age of Fable and Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths. That was the advice, nearly 30 years ago in the Yale Review, of a classicist seeking to separate the wheat from the chaff among what by then had become a very crowded field of mythographical collections and handbooks in English. “Bullfinch” (sic), in his judgment, was contemptible for his bowdlerization and his theoretical naïveté, and because of these defects he merited “disrecommendation” (sic). As for Graves’s mythography, it was no less than “pernicious,” concealing wild inaccuracies beneath a specious academic tone and manner (Bers 1985, 373). Students of mythology were briskly warned to shun Bulfinch and Graves, and to repair instead to other, more dependable, authorities. But students of mythography, as opposed to mythology, should ignore that warning. Bulfinch’s The Age of Fable (1855) and Graves’s The Greek Myths (1959) are landmark works – not as contributions to the theoretical study of myth, but as two of the most significant modern instances of mythography as a mode of classical reception.
The Bostonian Thomas Bulfinch, scion of a distinguished New England family and son of the America’s first great architect, is the author of by far the most popular and frequently reprinted collection of classical mythology in America.1 What’s more, The Age of Fable broke fresh ground in mythography in English – an achievement that has been obscured in part by its popular success, and in part by its low standing among academics, who tend to dismiss it for its sanitization of myth and its theoretical unsophistication.2 It takes consulting Bulfinch’s predecessors to appreciate how he broke with their example. One could open, for instance, Andrew Tooke’s 1689 work The Pantheon, a handbook of mythology, translated from an early work in Latin by the French Jesuit Francois Pomey. Over the course of nearly two centuries since its appearance in English, The Pantheon enjoyed wide circulation on both sides of the Atlantic, running to 33 printings over the course of nearly two centuries (Cleary 2007, 280), and became a fixture of the curriculum at Bulfinch’s alma mater, the Boston Latin School (Holmes 1970, 354).
Tooke’s Pantheon is typical of early modern mythographies in several respects. It is intended as a school‐text and a reference book: it is rather to be consulted than read. Information is classified under categorical headings, allowing for little presentation of myths as narratives. So, for instance, the drama of Pentheus’ confrontation with Dionysus and the Bacchae is reduced to a single sentence, because it is offered not for its own appeal as a narrative but instead as illustrating Tooke’s point about the consequences of state suppression of Dionysiac rites (Tooke 1830, 72–73).3 The Pantheon is presented as an aid to those privileged to be receiving, or to have already received, classical training: Roman authors are duly quoted in Latin, often untranslated; Greek citations are obligingly glossed – in Latin. Often Tooke foregoes to narrate a myth at all (for instance, the story of Proteus), sending the reader to the relevant classical source – in the case of Proteus, to the eighth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses – confident that his readers have access to the relevant Greek and Latin volumes (Tooke 1830, 197). None of this means that mythographical collections prior to Bulfinch were entirely, as one of Bulfinch’s contemporary admirers claimed, “great dull books” (Anon 1856, 314). John Lemprière’s 1788 dictionary Bibliotecha Classica is crammed with suggestive detail, and famously nourished the imagination of John Keats. William King’s Historical Account of the Heathen Gods and Heroes (1710) – another Boston Latin School text – despite its format as a reference book, has its moments of wit. The American classicist Charles Anthon’s Classical Dictionary (1841), which appeared just 14 years before Bulfinch’s own book, may be dry, but in its account of myths engages vividly with the ideas of Creuzer and other recent theorists. But the conventions they have in common – as being reference books rather than readable narratives, and as presuming a classical education and access to the ancient sources – made them almost useless to the uninitiated.
Bulfinch overturns both these conventions. In the first instance, he eschews the model of the dictionary or encyclopedia. “Such sources,” he complains, “give us only the dry facts without any of the charm of the original narrative, and what is a poetical myth when stripped of its poetry? The story of Ceyx and Halcyone, which fills a chapter in our book, occupies but eight lines in the best (Smith’s) Classical Dictionary” (Martin 1991, xxii).4 Bulfinch instead presents the countless episodes of classical mythology, with their variants and overlaps, chiefly as a narrative. Classification and analysis are subordinated to the demands of narrative continuity. He seeks to present not only the facts about the myths, but to retell them with some measure of “the charm of the original narrative.” He distances himself from contemporary mythographies’ whiff of the classroom, which turned myth “into a form of catechism” (Martin 1991, xv), hoping instead to present myth “not as a study but as a relaxation from study” (Martin 1991, xxii). The Age of Fable is the first modern classical mythography intended to be read for pleasure.
Bulfinch achieves more than just greater narrative amplitude than his predecessors. He reconstructs classical mythology along a broad narrative arc, from the creation of the world to the founding of Rome. So after an expository introductory chapter featuring a very conventional catalogue of divinities and their attributes, Bulfinch launches into an extended narrative of the creation and early history of the world – a distinctly literary treatment, for in it he closely follows the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Where he can, he works his transitions to suggest narrative continuity between myths, and even groups of myths. There are artful interweavings. He arranges, for instance, that his account of Bacchus should appear a few pages after his account of Theseus – not an obvious choice, but it allows him to knit together the stories of the hero and the god through the narrative thread (so to speak) of Ariadne, who figures in both stories (Martin 1991, 137–149). Such collocation stands in contrast not only to the typical presentation of dictionaries (whose format necessarily relegates Ariadne, Bacchus, and Theseus to discrete and distant entries, and so minimizes their interrelation), but also the more discursive mythographical compendia. In Tooke, for instance, Bacchus, as a major deity, appears in an early chapter (1830, 64–76), and Theseus, as a mere mortal, in a much later one (1830, 259–263); no casual reader would perceive any link between them. To undo such severances, where possible, is part of Bulfinch’s method. The phrasing of his transitions presumes of his readers that they should take in the book from beginning to end, and often invites them to associate the present topic of his narrative with earlier ones (‘We have seen in the story of Theseus how Ariadne…’). In this respect The Age of Fable has more in common with the Metamorphoses or the Morte d’Arthur than with the mythographical collections Bulfinch would have had before him in his time.
Modest about his literary pretensions, Bulfinch would have disavowed comparison with artists of the order of Ovid or Mallory. But his book deserves a minor place in the history of English literature, both on its own merits and for its historical value, as having a relation to contemporary literary receptions of myth. The Age of Fable is cognate with popular works by two important Anglophone writers: an American, Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose Gothic retellings of selected Greek myths for children appeared in 1851 and 1852 as A Wonder‐Book and Tanglewood Tales; and an Englishman, Charles Kingsley, who published his own narrative adaptation of myths, The Heroes (1856), one year after The Age of Fable. More broadly, Bulfinch’s book is part of what critics have acknowledged as a particular interest in, and reception of, classical myth that characterized one of the more important moments in the English literary tradition: the so‐called “Flowering of New England,” during which, within a period of around three decades in the general environs of Boston, many of the early masterpieces of American literature were composed.5
The Age of Fable also overturned the second convention, by which mythographical works were chiefly aimed at readers who had, or were receiving, classical training. Bulfinch instead addresses himself precisely to those without classical training and unlikely ever to receive it. He had in mind a new kind of readership which, since the late eighteenth century, had been growing in numbers and influence on both sides of the Atlantic: middle‐class readers, the products of schools that offered no Latin or Greek, and who clamored for some access to the classical knowledge which their merely “English education,” as it came to be called, had denied them (Stray 1998, 102). Reading was “no longer the sole preserve of a small elite” but “the preferred pastime of the new middle classes” (Hale 2006, 35). The author of a late‐Victorian volume of translations of Roman satire, who hoped his work would appeal to “the English, perhaps even the classical, reader” (Evans 1901, 1), tellingly signals not only the existence but even the precedence of this new kind of reader. Publishers responded to this new market chiefly by supplying, in unprecedented quantities, inexpensive and (usually) practical translations of classical literature. Through such means the classics were becoming increasingly democratized. The Age of Fable belongs to that wider process, but makes an original contribution in being the first work of mythography in this popularizing tradition. “Our work is not for the learned, nor for the theologian, nor for the philosopher,” Bulfinch insists, but for “the English reader” (Martin 1991, xxii–xiii).
The result of these innovations is that unlike its predecessors, The Age of Fable is meant to assist its readers to an appreciation of English, not classical, literature. The “English reader” of the nineteenth century – literate, curious, but without classical training – could scarcely be expected to read the classics, even in translation: “the field is too extensive,” Bulfinch thought, and in any case a classical education was no longer practical. “To devote study to a species of learning which relates wholly to false marvels of obsolete faiths is not to be expected of the general reader in a practical age like this.” What Bulfinch did think practical, though, was to offer The Age of Fable as an aid to understanding English literature’s allusive relations to myth. Accordingly, Bulfinch concludes his retellings of myth, wherever possible, with quotations of relevant passages of English literature, as if they, and not the myths, were the point. His principle of selection is not at all that of a pure mythologist: “Having chosen mythology as connected with literature for our province,” he insists, pointedly excluding wide areas of myth, “we have endeavored to omit nothing which the reader of elegant literature is likely to find occasion for” (Martin 1991, xxii). His critical opinion, when he does interpose it, focuses on English literature, not mythology. Spenser, he opines, “improves upon Ovid” (Martin 1991, 98). He is alert to the value of translation as a mode of English literature, distinguishing Pope’s rendering of a passage of Homer as poetically superior to Cowper’s version of the same passage (Martin 1991, 199). Recounting the myth of Glaucus and Scylla, he goes out of his way to give prominence to an alternate version of the myth which is not Greek at all, but the invention of Keats (Martin 1991, 55), and he takes pains to digress from his presentation of Antigone to acknowledge a contemporary critic’s recent article comparing her to Shakespeare’s Cordelia (Martin 1991, 165). Itself a modest literary accomplishment, The Age of Fable is the first major work of mythography in English principally concerned with modern literature’s reception of classical myth.
Exactly one century after the publication of The Age of Fable, Penguin Classics brought out a new, two‐volume compendium, Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths. It was intended as a companion to its successful line of classical translations issued in paperback to a mass market.6 A leading poet and novelist, whose works of historical fiction (outstandingly I Claudius) often drew on his wide acquaintance with classical literature, Graves might have followed Bulfinch by presenting mythology chiefly as narrative. In the event, he does something like the opposite: he shifts his focus away from his retellings of the myths themselves, giving prominence instead to his critical, indeed often highly polemical, annotations. Each of Graves’s 171 chapters (strictly unconnected, but arranged to suggest a rough chronology from the creation accounts to the homecoming of Odysseus) falls into three sections: the retelling of a myth, a citation of classical sources, and critical annotations. This third section is the most important: the notes are often as long as, and in many cases longer than, the myths they comment upon. They upstage the telling of the myths themselves.
In this way Graves makes The Greek Myths into an occasion for giving expression, in a new medium – mythography – to his cherished and eccentric theory of the White Goddess, long embodied in his own poetry,7 and articulated in his book‐length treatise The White Goddess (1948), “a historical grammar of poetic myth.” There Graves had asserted the existence, in remote antiquity, of a matriarchal religion, based on a goddess‐figure whose three aspects correspond to phases of the moon and to the stages of youth, maturity, and age. Her consorts (whether as kings, lovers, or in some other role) are always subordinate and always to die as sacrificial victims. “The language of poetic myth” which developed to honor this female deity remains, for Graves, “the language of true poetry.” But that language was “tampered with in late Minoan times when invaders from Central Asia began to substitute patrilineal for matrilineal institutions and remodel or falsify the myths to justify the social changes” (Graves 1948, x). Graves has a name for this kind of tampering with of the “true form” of myth. He calls it “iconotropy,” and to detect and expose classical myth’s iconotropic distortions of the “true myth” of the White Goddess is Graves’s obsessive burden throughout The Greek Myths.
Obsessive, because Graves finds in myth after myth evidence – which he sets out in the form of those extensive annotations – of “tampering” with the “true myth” of the White Goddess and her doomed consorts. So, for instance, Icarus’s donning of wings to escape from Crete is, for Graves, an iconotropic distortion of an ancient matriarchal rite involving “the ritual burning of the solar king’s surrogate, who had put on eagles’ wings” for that occasion (Graves 1959, I. 316). The same, or a very similar, explanation is attached to dozens of mythological personages, from major figures such as Pelops and Hippolytus, to minor characters such as Glaucus, Myrtilus. Among them is Ganymede, whose myth is “a misreading of an icon which showed the new king preparing for his sacred marriage [to the White Goddess] … yet the tradition of Ganymede’s youth suggests that the king shown on the icon was the royal surrogate and interrex, ruling only for a single day” (Graves 1959, I.116). The effect of Graves’s notes is often effectively to inform his readers that the myth he has just recounted is no proper myth at all, but some other, less fundamental, kind of narrative. So, the familiar story of Phaethon, as it has come down to us, is not a myth but merely “an instructive fable” whose moral is that: “fathers should not spoil their sons … (I. 157–158). This fable, however, is not quite so simple as it seems: it has a mythic importance in its reference to the annual sacrifice of a royal prince.” The telling detail lies in Phaethon’s identification with the sun: “The sacred king pretended to die at sunset; the boy interrex was at once invested with his titles, dignities, and sacred implements, married to the queen, and killed twenty‐four hours later” (Graves 1959, I.157).
At his most extreme, Graves not only disavows the received forms of myths but reconstructs, by inference, alternative versions of myths which suit his theory of the White Goddess. So, after recounting the traditional elements of the Oedipus myth, Graves in his notes conjectures a “true” version, in which Oedipus’s troubles come upon him because he overthrows the hitherto matriarchal rule at Thebes, initiated by the chthonic “Hera the Throttler,” and replaces it with a patriarchal order (Graves 1959, II.15).
Critics then and now have judged these notes a brilliant performance, but inaccurate and theoretically crude.8 Chief among Graves’s hostile critics was Professor H.J. Rose of St. Andrews, whose own Handbook of Greek Mythology (1928) had been among the standard general handbooks of mythology. Rose’s dismissal of Graves’s White Goddess matriarchy, with its annual sacrificial kings and their surrogates, as “a fantastic picture of a culture such as never existed in Europe,” is echoed in almost every other classicist’s review, though without the petulance to which Rose must have felt entitled as the rival author of a sober and responsible mythography. And yet one (perhaps condescending) concession of Rose’s – that Graves’s pet theory might be “legitimate enough in a work of the imagination, but quite out of place in a handbook of mythology” (Rose 1955, 208) – anticipates a seam of criticism in which The Greek Myths is appreciated chiefly as a literary, rather than a scholarly, accomplishment. Dudley Fitts, classicist and poet‐translator, in the year of its publication, called The Greek Myths “a kind of poetry in itself” (Fitts 1965, 16). A recent critic agrees that it is “a work of the poetic imagination … a poetic mythography” (Pharand 2007, 69). George Steiner acknowledges the book’s inadequacy as a guide for the neophyte – “this should not be a man’s first dictionary of mythology” – even as he commends it as a work of the imagination: “but it should certainly be his second. There may come a poet or dramatist who will make of his Greek Myths what the Renaissance made of its Ovid” (Steiner 1960, 360). The consensus among even its critics is that The Greek Myths, if a scholarly failure, is in one way or another a contribution to literature.
There are at least two ways of putting more precisely the case that The Greek Myths is an important instance of literary classical reception. The first is to point to how it is linked to Anglo‐American literary modernism by its debt to the theoretical movement that has come to be known, somewhat imprecisely, as the “Cambridge school.”9 The scholars in this movement tended to interpret myth in comparative and anthropological terms. They studied Greek and Roman mythology not in isolation, but in relation to many other mythological and ritual systems, and they saw myth as the survival, in verbal form, of various features of ancient social practices, most notably religious ritual. (For this reason they are sometimes referred to as the “Cambridge ritualists.”) Grave’s own theory of mythology, with its matriarchy and ritual sacrifices of kings, consorts and their surrogates, though highly reductive, idiosyncratic, and often fanciful, nonetheless belongs broadly to the anthropological view of myth which the Cambridge school had introduced. In his theory of iconotropy, for instance, Graves is not far from a position taken by Jane Harrison, that “ritual practice misunderstood explains the elaboration of myth” (Harrison 1922, iii).
The “anthropological turn” that the Cambridge school brought about in the study of mythology greatly influenced the literature of the twentieth century. The comparativist approach, for instance, of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890‐1915) presents a synthesis of world religions, myths, and rituals, which is mirrored, if not consciously imitated, in such literary works as Finnegans Wake. One contemporary critic of Graves invoked James Joyce’s (1939) masterpiece – a sprawling, syncretizing Key to All Mythologies – as an analogue to The Greek Myths (Macpherson 1958, 18–19). A more modest, but no less apt, analogue is the English poet Ted Hughes, whose extensive treatment of myth in his own poems and translations accords with his generally anthropological approach to myth. (His now famous decision, as a Cambridge undergraduate, to drop his English course in favor of Anthropology and Archaeology, itself neatly embodies an inclination in the larger literary culture.)10
A little over three decades before the publication of The Greek Myths, an even greater poet than Graves had written the following footnote to gloss line 218 of The Waste Land (“I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives”):
Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a “character,” is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one‐eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem. The whole passage from Ovid is of great anthropological interest: [quotes Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.318–336].
(Eliot 1963, 72–73)
In this erudite annotation to his own poem, T.S. Eliot anticipates the method, style and tone of the later poet‐turned mythographer Robert Graves, who wrote (for instance) this gloss on the myth of the Judgment of Paris:
These three goddesses are one goddess in triad: Athene the maiden, Aphrodite the nymph, and Hera the crone – and Aphrodite is presenting Paris with the apple, rather than receiving it from him. This apple, symbolizing her love bought at the price of his life, will be Paris’ passport to the Elysian Fields, the apple orchards of the west, to which only the souls of heroes are admitted. A similar gift is frequently made in Irish and Welsh myth; as well as by the Three Hesperides, to Heracles; and by Eve, “the mother of all living,” to Adam. Thus Nemesis, goddess of the sacred grove who, in late myth, became a symbol of divine vengeance on proud kings, carries an apple branch, her gift to heroes.
(Graves 1959, I.21–22).
For Graves, this myth is – as the passage of Ovid had been for Eliot – “of great anthropological interest.” Eliot may or may not have agreed with Graves’s eccentric insistence that the conventional myth of the Judgment of Paris preserves a record of an “ancient ritual situation,” as he calls it, in which the White Goddess figure presents a talismanic apple to her doomed consort. But both Eliot’s and Graves’s notes imply a similar relation of myth to poetry. From Eliot’s post‐Cambridge school perspective, Tiresias is but one manifestation of a multiple personage, just as in the poem “all the women are one woman” who are themselves conflated into the figure of Tiresias. The relation of myth to literature proposed by Bulfinch – that myths are charming fictions for poets to quote or adapt, more or less instrumentally – would be wholly inadequate to readers seeking to understand the relationship of the myths about Tiresias to Eliot’s poetry. For Graves, too, a myth is no longer what it had been for Bulfinch, a tale for poets to adorn their works. Aphrodite is a conflation of the three persons who stand behind the myth: to see past the conventional Aphrodite to the universal and many‐personed goddess beyond her is the basis of poetic insight. “No poet can hope to understand the nature of poetry” without this kind of vision (Graves 1948, 373).
Eliot’s footnote points to a second way of registering the value of The Greek Myths as literary reception. It is linked to literary modernism and postmodernism in a point of style: the aesthetic of scholarly or pseudo‐scholarly commentary. One of the very first reviewers of The Greek Myths relished the way in which the detached scholarly tone of Graves’s annotations crisply holds the lid down on the seething subject matter of myth’s primitive ritual origins (Weisinger 1956, 243). One could go further: such footnotes and annotations are part of a wider aesthetic. It is a characteristic that George Steiner, writing on Graves, found also in Joyce: a “genius for elaborate, immensely erudite and labored wit […] all the devices of pedantic seriousness” (Steiner 1960, 364). To which I might add the names of Borges and Nabokov (especially the Nabokov of Pale Fire), whose elegant pseudepigrapha lovingly send up the fastidious academic’s pedantry. Part of the aesthetic of The Greek Myths lies in the possibility that its displays of erudition may involve ironical play. Roguish Eliot himself disavowed his own learned footnotes to The Waste Land as “bogus scholarship” (Eliot 1957, 110), and opinion is divided on whether they are to be taken in earnest or as donnish parody. Vanda Zajko has suspected just such irony in Eliot (Zajko 2009, 113); and Steiner detects in Graves’s notes to The Greek Myths the possibility that he is “pulling academics and pedants, leg‐first, into some vastly serious hoax”: “I do not suggest that Graves is not persuaded of the truth of the main ideas put forward in The Greek Myths […] I do suggest there is cunning laughter in the way in which he presents his learning” (Steiner 1960, 364).
Ironical or not, the erudite notes that so dominate The Greek Myths elegantly bring together a distinctive modernist style with the post‐Cambridge school anthropological approach so central to twentieth‐century literature.
An accidental symmetry of chronology – that The Greek Myths appeared exactly one century after The Age of Fable – reflects the nearly polar differences in their approaches to mythography. Bulfinch, mild, catholic, and un‐theoretical, presents the myths as durable instances of literary fancy, useful chiefly as a key to allusions in English literature and, as such, a means of self‐improvement or edification. Graves, on the other hand, is theoretic and polemical, seeking on every page to expose as iconotropic misreadings any account of myth failing to conform to his own totalizing theory of the White Goddess. He absorbs broadly the implications of the Cambridge school, retelling and reinterpreting the myths not as ends in themselves, still less as background material for understanding polite literature, but as more or less corrupt versions of the one true myth which is the source of all poetry.
Yet the unlikely similarities between Bulfinch and Graves are more illuminating. Both writers made mythography a force in that very modern, and still ongoing, phenomenon, the democratization of the classics. Bulfinch broke with tradition by addressing mythography to the new and growing audience of “English readers” eager to acquire culture but unlikely ever to study classics. Graves, too insisted that The Greek Myths was “a popular book” (O’Prey 1984, 129), meaning that it was the first to transmit to a general audience – readers of mass‐market paperbacks – the major revolution in the theory of mythology of the past century (though in his own eccentric version). Both men achieved these innovations working outside the academic establishment.
Even more importantly, Bulfinch and Graves brought mythography into closer relation to modern literature than ever before. Appreciation of English, not classical, literature is the chief concern of The Age of Fable. By avoiding the discontinuous style of a reference book, and inclining (like Hawthorne and Kingsley) to a readable, connected narrative, Bulfinch nudged The Age of Fable closer to the condition of literature in its own right. The Greek Myths is even less ambiguously a work of literature in itself. Its stylish retellings of the myths bear the mark of the laconic and ironical prose style of a master of historical fiction. Just as telling, though, are the scholarly (or pseudo‐scholarly) notes, which echo in their themes and tone writers from Eliot and Joyce, through Graves himself, to Ted Hughes and beyond. Bulfinch and Graves are linked in having written mythographies which are not only retellings, but receptions of classical myth, enriching its living relations to modern literature.
By far the most useful and extensive critical treatment of Bulfinch’s The Age of Fable is the introduction and commentary that accompanies Richard Martin’s edition of Bulfinch’s complete mythological works (Martin 1991). Marie Sally Cleary’s critical biography of Bulfinch takes stock of how The Age of Fable may have been shaped by Bulfinch’s family background, education, career fortunes, and by the social and historical context of his time. Jay Macpherson (1958) gives the most acute and witty analysis of The Greek Myths, and Michael Pharand (2007) the amplest recent survey, evaluation, and bibliography of its critical reception. Those wishing to investigate the scores of other works of modern classical mythography beyond Bulfinch and Graves can begin with the survey by John Peradotto (1973). Also recommended is A.G.G. Gibson’s Robert Graves and the Classical Tradition (2015).