86 pages • 2 hours read
Edith HamiltonMythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1942A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 6: “The Less Important Myths”
Chapter 1 Summary: “Midas—and Others”
Midas was a king of Phrygia, who asked Bacchus to turn anything he touched into gold. Midas quickly discovered this turned even the food and wine he tried to consume into lumps of metal and asked Bacchus to reverse the gift. Later, Apollo turned Midas’s ears into those of a donkey as punishment for the king choosing Pan over Apollo in a musical contest.
Aesculapius was the son of a mortal woman, Coronis, and Apollo. When Apollo discovered Coronis had betrayed him with a mortal man, he killed her (or had her killed), snatching up the child she was pregnant with and delivering him to the wise Centaur Chiron to raise. His skill in healing was unsurpassed, but he drew the gods’ displeasure by thinking “thoughts too great for man”: He raised a man from the dead (398). Zeus struck him down with a thunderbolt, and Apollo avenged his son’s death by killing alternately the Cyclopes or their sons. Zeus punished Apollo by enslaving him to king Admetus. Despite his missteps with the gods, Aesculapius “was honored on earth as no other mortal” (398). His temples drew the sick, who would pray and offer sacrifices for healing.
The Danaids were the 50 daughters of Danaus, a descendant of Io who lived near the Nile. Aegyptus’s 50 sons wanted to marry them, but they objected and fled with their father to Argos, which protected them as suppliants. At some point, the weddings went forward, however, and their father gave them daggers with which to slay their new husbands as they slept. One Danaid, Hypermnestra, pitied her young husband and helped him escape, for which her father imprisoned her. The 49 murderous Danaids were punished in the underworld by being forced forever to refill jars covered in holes.
Glaucus was a fisherman who the gods transformed into a sea-god with a fish’s tail. He fell in love with the nymph Scylla, but she ran from him. Glaucus sought help from Circe, who in turn fell in love with him, but he remained faithful to Scylla. Angry at the nymph, Circe poisoned her waters, transforming her into the terrifying monster who terrorized Jason, Odysseus, and Aeneas.
Erysichthon drew the ire of Ceres, and she punished him by filling him with an unquenchable hunger. He spent his fortune trying to fill his hunger without success, finally resorting to selling his daughter, who prayed to Poseidon to save her from being enslaved. He transformed her into a fisherman, enabling her to escape and return to her father. Erysichthon sold her over and over, and she was always transformed and able to return to him until his hunger finally compelled him to consume himself until he died.
Pomona and Vertumnus were Roman gods. Nymph Pomona kept away from men; concerned only with the art of gardening, she shunned the woodland. Vertumnus wooed her ardently, but she steadfastly resisted him until he visited her as an old woman and pointed out the interdependence of the tree and the vine. When he finally revealed himself, she accepted him as her partner.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Brief Myths Arranged Alphabetically”
Hamilton provides brief vignettes covering a variety of mythical figures and couples. Among the most prominent featured are the Amazons, a tribe of warrior women purportedly from Themiscryra in the Caucasus. According to Hamilton, few stories are told about them; they are more commonly portrayed in visual media. They are known for invading Lycia, Phrygia, and Attica and for fighting alongside the Trojans under queen Penthesilea, whom Achilles killed then fell in love with.
Arachne, whose story survives only in Ovid, was a famed weaver who rashly and arrogantly competed against Minerva and lost, through no lack of talent. When jealous Minerva destroyed Arachne’s work, she hanged herself, and Minerva turned her into a spider. Goddess of dawn Aurora fell in love with Tithonus and asked Zeus to make him immortal but neglected to ask for her lover to be endlessly youthful. Thus, he continued to age until he became a dry husk, or, alternately, was turned into a grasshopper out of pity. Biton and Cleobis were the sons of Cydippe, a priestess of Hera, who performed a great feat for their mother. When she prayed for them to receive a great blessing, they fell asleep and never woke up.
Chiron was unique among Centaurs because of “his goodness and wisdom” (412). He trained great heroes, including Achilles, Aesculapius, and Actaeon, and was accidentally killed by Hercules. Dryope plucked the blossom of a lotus tree not realizing it was a nymph, Lotis, who had disguised herself as a tree to escape her pursuer. Dryope was then transformed into a tree herself. Leto, Latona in Latin, was the daughter of the Titans Phoebe and Coeus. She bore Artemis and Apollo to Zeus on the island of Delos, then a floating island and the only one that would accept her when she was in labor. Thereafter, the island became fixed and later was home to a great temple of Apollo.
Marsyas was a talented musician, who challenged Apollo to a music contest, lost, and was flayed alive by the god. The Myrmidons were a tribe of men created from ants and Achilles’ followers in the Trojan war. The Pleiades were seven daughters of Atlas, one of whom, Maia, was the mother of Hermes with Zeus. Another, Electra, was the mother of Dardanus, founder of the Trojans. Zeus placed them in the stars to escape a pursuer. Sisyphus was a Corinthian king, who revealed to the river-god Asopus that Zeus had carried off his daughter and was punished severely as a result. In the underworld, Sisyphus was condemned to roll a rock up a hill eternally: As soon as he got to the top, the rock would roll back down the hill.
Part 6 Analysis
In the final section of the book devoted to Greek and Roman mythologies, Hamilton narrates a variety of myths that do not fit obviously into her earlier chronological and genealogical categories. Hamilton herself does not directly express her rationale in including the specific myths that she does, but generally, they are myths that may have been familiar to her contemporary readers via their reception in Western European art and literature across the modern period. Ovid, from whom she primarily draws, was particularly influential in the arts. Some of the myths he retells are believed to have had Greek precedents, but if they did, no Greek sources for them have survived. Her only other sources in this section are Pindar, from whom she takes portions of Aesculapius’s myth, and Aeschylus, who provides the Danaids’.
The first section, “Midas—and Others,” tells slightly longer vignettes than the second section, “Brief Myths Arranged Alphabetically,” which provide quick overviews of mythical figures and the narratives associated with them. Functionally, this section of the book incorporates myths that fit Hamilton’s intention to provide for her readers, as she expresses in her Preface, “knowledge of the myths” of Greece and Rome (xii). Those that lie outside of the larger structural narrative are recorded here in encyclopedic fashion.
Hamilton’s tendency to present Greece and Rome as a progressive chronological narrative leads to some imprecise conclusions on Hamilton’s part. Throughout the book, she generally uses Greek names when drawing on Greek sources and Roman names when drawing on Roman sources. This seems to be one of her primary nods to avoid “unifying” the myths of Greece and Rome, as she notes in her Preface. Confusion arises, however, when she makes absolute statements without specifying whether these statements also hold with Greek precedents. For example, in her narrative of Erysichthon, Hamilton notes that his is “the only [myth] in which the good goddess, Ceres, appears cruel and vindictive” (403). This may be so in Roman versions, but the Greek Homeric Hymn to Demeter portrays Demeter starving all of humanity and refusing to relent until Zeus promises to reunite her with her daughter.
An underlying issue is that for the Archaic and Classical Greeks, duality inhered in everything. If a goddess were capable of being “good,” which is to say nurturing and beneficial, then that goddess’ power lay in being able to invert that same force into destruction. This is the power Demeter harnesses in the Homeric Hymn devoted to her. Her ability to nurture humanity through crops is also where her power to control outcomes lies, since refusing to allow the crops to grow causes mass devastation. What Hamilton seems to view as “progress” involves moving away from “duality” (hybrid gods in the “East,” for example) and toward more rigid categories of “good” and “bad.”
