To him mythical tradition was the source of all wisdom and all knowledge of the past. To him it provided the answer to all the enigmas of life. Prometheus, his favorite character, appears both in his Theogony, an epic on the dynasties of the gods and their origin, and in his Works and Days, a didactic poem full of wise sayings designed for all the days and all the exigencies of peasant life. In each of these works the poet is concerned with the problem of the origin of the evil from which the world suffers. The story of Prometheus provided him with an explanation for the otherwise incomprehensible fact that the life of man is full of sickness and need. The race of man shares in atoning for the guilt which Prometheus, the mythical helper of man, took on himself when he stole the fire from Olympus and brought it to helpless mortals. Hesiod’s attitude toward this myth is sober and devout reflection. He accepts it as an instrument for his own meditations on the origin of toil and suffering on earth, the “social problem” as we should call it. Obviously, Hesiod welded together a number of legends which were originally independent into a long drawn-out, carefully constructed story. The tale of the theft of fire and the fact that Prometheus was punished for this deed, which many people must have regarded as meritorious, had to be motivated by some previous fault which had called forth the anger of the gods and determined Zeus to withhold fire from man. Hesiod found the cause of this anger in the myth of the bone-sacrifice in Mecone, a tale which originally had nothing whatsoever to do with the theft of fire but merely served to explain an old religious rite. A certain type of myth, called aition, was devised to give explanations of this kind. The seams in Hesiod’s fabric are quite visible to the practiced eye: his style is not very smooth. His attempt to weave his scattered sources closely together and his superimposed theological interpretation of events are quite apparent.

The next story in our book is that of Phaethon, the son of the sun-god, who begged his father to let him drive the chariot of the sun for one whole day, and plunged headlong from the heights of heaven because he did not know how to manage the immortal horses. This tale is vivid and colorful, and told with brilliant technique, but with a tendency to rhetorical effect and a touch of the didactic. Here Schwab follows Ovid, who tells the story in his Metamorphoses, and we cannot fail to admire the sophisticated artistry of this Roman poet who wrote in the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, even though it is far removed from the naïveté and the gravity and devoutness of Hesiod. Ovid deals with the myth to suit himself; now he uses it merely as a means to exhibit his masterly style, now he is swept away by the charm of the story itself and succeeds in sweeping away his readers. The scholar cannot deal with the tales of Hesiod and Ovid on the same plane. In Hesiod’s telling, one still feels the living breath of an era which reshaped and expanded myths, an age in which myths possessed deep meaning; while in Ovid one sees only mythology. But aside from the fact that nowhere else can we find the Phaethon episode told as fully as in Ovid, no one else could have told it so fascinatingly; and so Schwab accepted what each poet had to say for the story in it.

Thus the author goes back to the most various antique sources. Many of the myths are taken from the dramas of the three great Athenian masters of tragedy: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (fifth century B.C.). Others are borrowed from later, post-classical writers of the Hellenistic age—the legend of the Argonauts, for instance, which is told according to the epic of Apollonius of Rhodes (third century B.C.). But Schwab has treated his material with the greatest freedom. Frequently he introduces episodes taken from various poets of antiquity into a story whose main outlines he took from another source. In other words, he does just what his predecessors of old did—mythographers such as Apollodorus, for example. An instance of this is the story of Prometheus. While it follows Hesiod in the main, the description of the hero is enriched by borrowings from other sources. Plato relates that Prometheus secretly stole fire from the smithy of Hephaestus; Aeschylus also has Prometheus steal it from Hephaestus and bring it to earth in a hollow fennel stalk. But Sappho knew another version of this incident. According to her, Prometheus brought fire from heaven to earth after lighting a torch at one of the fiery wheels of the sun chariot, and this is the version Schwab blended into Hesiod’s story.