The book you hold in your hands contains a retelling of the traditional Greek myths and legends. You will meet all the famous and familiar stories (and hopefully some new ones), but you may also find some unfamiliar details. Retelling the Greek myths is not a simple matter, above all because very few, if any, of the myths exist in a single version. Often, in fact, there are downright contradictions between extant versions of a tale. There is no such thing, then, as the definitive version of any myth; in fact, the more famous a story became, the more versions there were of it.
This variability is essential to the Greek myths. They did not exist in single, monolithic, or “authentic” versions. Consider the work of the great tragedians of Athens in the fifth century BCE—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. They took the traditional tales and tweaked them for their own reasons—often to make a political or ethical point relevant to their immediate audience. As long as the heart of the story remained unchanged, or was intact in the background, writers were free to add and subtract as they chose.
This is how the stories retain their vitality. By the same token, Ovid’s often fanciful retellings in the early years of the first century CE; or Ariosto’s adaptation of the Perseus myth in Orlando furioso (early sixteenth century); or the 1967 Star Trek episode “Who Mourns for Adonis”; or Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 movie Troy; or Rick Riordan’s series of Percy Jackson books for children; or the thousands of other examples that could be given—all serve to perpetuate in their own ways and for their own purposes the vitality of the ancient Greek tales of war and adventure, magic and miracles, love, jealousy, murder, rape, and revenge.
The ancient Greeks loved stories—so much that they illustrated their walls, temples, high-end tableware, ceremonial armor, and even their furniture with artwork that was intended to tell tales. But for them the stories served additional purposes, over and above entertainment. When they told the myths to their children, they expected them to be educational as well as exciting: to teach about the nature of the gods and goddesses, and about their awesome powers; to illustrate right behavior for mortal men; to see that, though the gods are relatively omnipotent, and Fate is unavoidable, it is still a mortal’s willful activity that brings disaster down on his or her head. Other myths served more straightforwardly to give emotional power to the foundation of a community, to make a religious ritual more meaningful, or to speculate about the origin of the universe.
No myths endure unless they give a community an underlying layer of meaningfulness. Nevertheless, the ancient Greek myths and legends have proved to have the astonishing ability to transcend their origins, the particular cultural contexts in which they arose, and be relevant within our societies today, as if they tapped into some deep layer of the human mind. For us, it has been a pleasure and a privilege to enter the stream of classical myth, to allow it to flow through us and, we hope, to excite and engage further generations of readers.
ROBIN AND KATHRYN WATERFIELD