The Greeks themselves thought so. Plato wanted the future citizens of his ideal republic to begin their literary education with the telling of myths rather than with mere facts or rational teachings. This plan of the great philosopher of education mirrors the life of Greece as it then was, for there too the education of man—the paideia—began with the telling of myths, just as later, in the Christian era, Bible stories and legends of the lives of the saints were the basis of all education.

But in the life of a Greek of the classical age myths never ceased to be a subject of deep interest. In early childhood they were the first food for his spirit, which he sucked in, as it were, with his mother’s milk. And as he grew older, he returned to them again on a higher plane when he was introduced to the masterpieces of the Greek poets. Now it is true that even today millions of people learn the ancient Greek myths through reading Homer in modern translations; but at that time the mythical tradition reached Greek youth through hundreds of other channels, beside the stories of the Trojan cycle which survive in the Iliad and the Odyssey, for the poetry as well as the art of Greece was chiefly concerned with shaping the traditional legends. What the boy had eagerly absorbed as exciting stories, the youth found brought in its most perfect form in the art and poetry of his people. And later, when he grew to manhood, Homer’s characters passed before his eyes on the stage of the Greek theater, in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, where their destinies no longer seemed a tale of long ago, but of immediate, dramatic interest. The audience which filled the benches at these performances regarded the events and sufferings they beheld as the most profound expression of the meaning of all human life.

Thus the entire humanistic education of the Greeks was welded into unity through the majesty and spiritual force which myths exerted on all stages of the inner development of the individual. And this continued to be so, even when—in the course of time—other branches of human knowledge and more and more applied arts were added to the traditional education. Ancient legends continued to be the source of all poetry and art for the nation, and the basic element of the literary education of the individual. They were also the point of departure for all philosophical thought, for the entire development of the Greek intellect. The fact that the Greek people was destined to be the nation of philosophers and the creator of western culture was certainly connected with its wealth of heroic legends and the overwhelming amount of its mythical speculation about the world, gods, and men. This tradition has been an inexhaustible mine of treasure for the poetry and philosophy of the Greeks themselves and of later centuries. Our completely rational civilization can boast of nothing comparable to this. Rome took over the legends of the Greeks because she had none of her own. And even in the Middle Ages, when new peoples came into the foreground of history, peoples who had national legends of their own, the Greek gods and heroes held their place and were no less popular than the new heroes of new nations. Thanks to their deep human significance which remains valid for all men, the Greek myths were universally recognized, and their characters live on to this day, either in simple tales or in the poetry of all the peoples in the cycle of western civilization. This survival of the myth—and it is by no means the only heritage we have taken over from the Greeks—reminds us that our so-called Christian civilization does not spring from Jewish-Christian sources alone, but is deeply rooted also in classical Greek and Roman tradition. The world of Greek myths is a constantly visible and effective symbol of this truth.

Realizing this fact, we want to reveal this world not only to the enraptured eyes of children but also to the more deeply searching vision of the young student, who is driven to probe for the universal significance of these tales beneath their poetic beauty. This was what Gustav Schwab had in mind when he went about retelling the legends of classical antiquity, simply but movingly. His book has delighted many generations, and no similar work has surpassed it. It owes its freshness and color to the wise restraint the author imposed on himself. He was neither the philosopher who expounds the meaning of myths, nor the scholar who investigates their source and ultimate significance and tries to restore them to their original form. Since this was not the author’s aim, his book is of little interest to the learned mythologists of our own day and age. He wrote for the average reader and wanted to convey the legends in the form they have come down to us from the classical period of antiquity. He was enchanted by the great art with which Greek and Roman poets—from the epics of Homer to the Heroides and Metamorphoses of Ovid—shaped and reshaped these myths; and whoever knows the texts he drew from, feels in every line of his book the profound effect they had on his imagination. Because of his naïveté and complete lack of scholarly ambition, the poetic power with which the poets of antiquity told these tales is preserved in Schwab’s retelling—often to an astonishing degree. He is, so to speak, the last of the mythographers of ancient times who retold the myths they found in the works of poets in their own language and style, and thus made them accessible to a wide circle of readers.

His close adherence to the models of the individual stories resulted in something the critical reader is sure to observe, in a change of tone from one tale to the next. To give a few examples chosen at random, the tale of Prometheus, which opens the book, is based mainly on Hesiod, the didactic Boeotian poet who probably lived in the eighth century B.C.