Oedipus has an agile and penetrating brain and solves every riddle with the greatest ease; but he is nevertheless blind to his own share in the disaster he unwittingly brings upon his city and his people. Bellerophon is a great hero in his fight against all external dangers and resists every temptation devised by feminine shrewdness and desire. But a strain of melancholy in his blood separates him from his fellow men and finally drives him, the radiant hero, to go his lonely way sick and bewildered, like one who is hated by all the gods, and finally to destroy himself to no purpose. Thus the philosophic mind of the Greek people shaped the characters of legend into a series of ideal types which serve as significant examples for the understanding of human nature.

The great poetry of the classical period of Greek literature clung to the primitive myth because it was intimately related to it. The myth was its soul as well as its body. But the increasingly rational criticism which the fifth century directed against all tradition likewise affected the myth, not only its gods and the picture it gave of the world, but also its heroes and its tragic concept of life. In the plays of Euripides, the last of these three great writers of tragedies, the rational doubting spirit invades even the shaping of the myth itself. His characters were modernized and in this process became less profound. These so-called “heroes” are unashamedly loquacious and discussed the everyday problems of the burghers of the poet’s own day and age. Under such circumstances it was difficult for them to maintain their heroic poise. It became merely a pose, and their words degenerated to empty declamation. The next step on this path was necessarily the abandonment of the myth. Drama became a mirror of modern middle-class life, and comedy with its happy ending carried the day against heroic tragedy. There were, to be sure, still some poets who in a highly artificial style wrote dramas based on myths, but they were ineffective. The only successful use of the tradition was the parodying of mythical content and characters which we find in the comedies of the time. Not until the post-classical period of Greek literature did serious poetry turn to the myth again to produce romantic and sentimental epics and elegies on mythical themes. But this poetry was academic, and the living myth had been converted into “mythology.” That was all the myth was to the Romans and to Roman poets.

It remained for the Romantic Movement of the nineteenth century to rediscover the true greatness of the mythical tradition. Since Romanticism was fundamentally opposed to the exaggerated rationalism of the preceding epoch, it tended to regard myths as a sort of primordial wisdom of mankind, a form of wisdom which modern man had impiously sacrificed in his arrogant pride of reason. It was in this spirit that a large part of modern research in the field of mythology was dedicated to the attempt to penetrate to the roots of mythical thinking and reveal its true meaning.

I have already pointed out that the book we have here is untouched by this speculative and symbolical conception of myths. The investigator of myths along the lines laid down by the Romantic School will think that the naïve teller of these tales has often ignored profundities. But this book is meant not only for children but also for the childlike spirit of the young and old alike. It conveys a breath of the imperishable strength of youth in Greek genius, which is perhaps most alive and beautiful in the myth. The Greeks felt this themselves. Plato called the mythical period of Greek poetry the flowering time of his people. In a certain sense this strength has never left the Greeks. “You Greeks are always children; there is no such thing as an old Greek,” said an Egyptian priest, the representative of an age-old civilization, to Solon, the sage of Athens, who came to Egypt by ship to see the wonders of the land of the Nile. These words of Plato’s are quoted from the Timaeus, the work of his old age, and Plato himself bears surpassing witness to the inexhaustible impulse of the Greeks to create myths in an era (the fourth century B.C.) in which the mythical tradition seemed to be dying off everywhere else. In his dialogues he invented a new kind of myth which blends old mythical elements of symbolic force with new philosophical ideas. Even Aristotle, Plato’s greatest pupil, the master of pure reason, once said: “The friend of wisdom (philosophos) is also a friend of the myth (philomythos).” That is how the most profound spirits among the Greeks thought at the zenith of their civilization. In a letter to an intimate friend this same Aristotle made a more personal confession.