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The question of sources concerns not only the origin of individual stories, but also the structure and organization of the various cycles of myth. The Greek mythological tradition, as summarized in a broadly representative ma
Until the development of prose literature in the latter part of the sixth century, Greek literature was exclusively poetic, and the richest sources for myth and legend were the works of the epic poets. The earliest epics to survive, the two Homeric epics and Hesiod’s Theogony, were probably written about the same time towards the end of the eighth century. Although they belong to the same broad genre, the poems attributed to these authors are quite different in nature. Homer was a story-teller on a grand scale and each of the Homeric epics is constructed on the basis of an overall plot ru
The main action of the Iliadcovers only a few days in the tenth and final year of the Trojan War, and the Odysseydescribes the return voyage of only one of the Greek heroes, although both poems assume a much broader background of Trojan myth and they contain many allusions to stories not directly covered in the poems themselves. The exceptional quality of the Homeric poems seems to have impressed itself on their audience from the begi
In his Theogony, Hesiod sought to organize the traditions concerning the gods into a coherent pattern by developing the comprehensive genealogical system which forms the basis of his poem. Begi
Historians were prominent amongst the earliest prose writers. Some concerned themselves with purely local matters, but others (including those mentioned amongst the authors most frequently cited by Apollodorus) had broader ambitions and covered the traditions associated with many parts of the Greek world. They could not extend their researches any distance into the past without engaging with what we would regard as myth; and in the present context, it is their contribution to mythography which interests us. But they regarded themselves as historians, and while they were not always totally uncritical, they were willing to accept myth and legend as reliable sources of historical truth. In this respect, they differed from the scholarly mythographers of the Hellenistic era, who were critical in their attitude to myth and regarded mythography as a separate area of investigation. These earlier authors, whose qualities must be judged from fragments and testimonies, are sometimes referred to as logographers to distinguish them from more critical historians like Herodotus and Thucydides; but since this term (which simply meant ‘prose writers’ in ancient usage) can be misleading if it is thought to describe a specific school of historians, it is safer to describe them merely as historians (or mythographer-historians or chroniclers).