Greetings, mortals! It’s your godly pal, Hades, Ruler of the Underworld, back again, and you know why. To tell you the truth! To right centuries of wrongs! To set things straight about the pack of lies my little brother Zeus, Ruler of the Universe and tireless myth-o-maniac (old Greek speak for “big fat liar”), has tried to pass off as the Greek myths.

Why are the myths so messed up, you ask? Because long, long ago, Zeus got his mitts on a copy of The Big Fat Book of Greek Myths. As the title says, it’s a big fat book. Zeus was too lazy to read it himself, so he made his nymphs take turns reading it aloud to him. Every time a nymph got to a part Zeus didn’t like, he’d yell, “FIX IT!” Then the nymphs had to scratch out that part of the story, put their heads together, and make up something that would please Zeus. If the old myth-o-maniac approved of their new version of the myth, he ordered them to write it down in the book. And the rest, as they say, is history. Make that HIStory. Zeus’s story, to be exact. You can open The Big Fat Book of Greek Myths to any page at all and read lies, lies, nothing but lies.

Why Zeus yelled “FIX IT!” so many times when the nymphs read him the myth about the mortal Atalanta is anyone’s guess. Zeus didn’t have anything to do with that myth. Not until his little walk-on part right at the end. Maybe Hera, Zeus’s wife and the goddess of marriage, was mad at him, and he was trying to get on her good side by giving marriage a boost. Who knows? All I know is that the myth you think you know is bull-hooey. Read it yourself right from The Big Fat Book. Go on, check it out:

It’s the last part that really gets to me: “The two married and lived happily ever after.” Not! The Atalanta myth is no fairy tale. It’s the story of a baby girl who was abandoned by her dad, a mean, scheming, money-hungry king, because she wasn’t a baby boy. But this baby girl grew up to be as big and strong as any big, strong man in Greece. She became famous, and then, of course, her dad had second thoughts and tried to get her back. At about that time, Melanion showed up and started tossing around golden apples, and when those golden apples appear in a myth, look out! They always mean trouble.

How about if I tell you the truth about Atalanta, right from the start? The beginning of this myth is downright embarrassing to me. I’d just as soon forget about it. But if I’m going to tell this story, and it looks like I am, then I’ll tell it just the way it happened.