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 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “The Great Heroes Before the Trojan War”
Chapter 1 Summary: “Perseus”
After an oracle warned king of Argos Acrisius that his daughter’s son would kill him, he imprisoned her in a bronze bunker. However, Danae, his daughter, became pregnant when Zeus visited her in the form of “golden rain” (192). Unwilling to kill his daughter and grandson (Perseus) directly, Acrisius locked them in a chest and set it out to sea. After washing ashore on an island, Danae and Perseus were cared for by kindly fisherman Dictys and his wife. Having fallen in love with Danae, the island’s ruler Polydectes contrived to get rid of Perseus by manipulating him into promising to bring him the head of Medusa, the mortal snake-haired Gorgon.
After visiting oracles at Delphi and Dodona, Perseus encountered Hermes, who advised him. First Perseus visited the Gray Women for directions to find the nymphs of the North, who gave him three essential gifts: winged sandals, “a magic wallet” that conformed to the size of whatever it needed to contain, and a cap that rendered the wearer invisible (197). Hermes gifted him an impervious sword and Athena a shield in which he could see Medusa’s reflection without being turned to stone. Hermes guided him to the Gorgons, and Athena guided his sword to strike the fatal blow.
While passing Ethiopia on his return home, Perseus encountered Andromeda, daughter of the Ethiopian king and queen, who had been offered as a sacrifice to a sea serpent. Perseus fell in love at first sight, slayed the serpent, and received permission to marry Andromeda. When they returned home, Perseus discovered that Polydectes was angry that Danae refused to marry him. At a banquet, Perseus used Medusa’s head to turn Polydectes and his court to stone, freeing the island from the tyrant. Apollo’s oracle was finally fulfilled when Perseus participated in athletic games in Larissa, and his discus accidentally struck and killed Acrisius, one of the spectators. Their troubles behind them, Perseus and Andromeda lived happy lives. Their son became Hercules’s grandfather. Perseus gave Medusa’s head to Athena, who put it in Zeus’s aegis that she carried for him.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Theseus”
Theseus was Athens’ great hero. The son of Athenian king Aegeus, Theseus was raised in southern Greece by his mother. When he grew into manhood and proved himself worthy of his father, he set off for Athens, determined to take the most difficult route “to become a great hero as quickly as possible” (204). His model was his cousin Hercules. Along his journey, he cleared the land of dangerous bandits, finally arriving in Athens a celebrated hero. Meantime, Aegeus had married Medea, who attempted to have Theseus poisoned, but her treachery was revealed. She fled to Asia, and Aegeus declared Theseus his heir. At this time, Athens was sending 14 young men and women to Crete as compensation for the death of Cretan king Minos’s son in Athens. The tributes were fed to the Minotaur, the half man, half bull son of Minos’s wife Pasiphae.
Intending to slay the Minotaur, Theseus volunteered as a tribute, promising his father that he would switch his ship’s sail from black to white on his return journey. In Crete, Minos’s daughter Ariadne fell in love with Theseus and helped him defeat the Minotaur and escape the labyrinth, after which they fled together. In one version, Theseus then abandoned Ariadne on Naxos. In another, Ariadne died. One common detail is that Theseus forgot to change the sails. Believing his son was dead, Aegeus threw himself into the sea, henceforth known as the Aegean. Theseus became king of Athens but “resigned his royal power and organized a commonwealth,” making Athens not only the most happy and prosperous city but also “the only true home of liberty” where “people governed themselves” (208).
Various narratives portray Theseus as “the perfect knight” (210). He restored justice to defeated Thebans in their civil war, welcomed elderly Oedipus when all others rejected him, and stood by Hercules in his darkest hour. As a hero, Theseus enjoyed danger and adventure. He had a son, Hippolytus, with an Amazon warrior; participated in the quest for the Golden Fleece and the Caledonian boar hunt; and fought beside his friend Pirithous against the Centaurs. He traveled to the underworld with Pirithous, who intended to kidnap Persephone, but Hades trapped them. Hercules saved Theseus, but they could not release Pirithous. When Helen was a child, Theseus kidnapped her briefly, and when he was an adult, he married Phaedra, Ariadne’s sister.
When he grew into manhood, Hippolytus came to Theseus and Phaedra’s home. The youth scorned Aphrodite, choosing to worship only Artemis. To punish him, Aphrodite caused Phaedra to fall in love with him. After he rejected her advances, she killed herself, leaving behind a note accusing him of laying “violent hands” on her (214). Theseus banished Hippolytus, who was then fatally injured in a chariot accident. Theseus learned the truth, and father and son were briefly reconciled before Hippolytus succumbed to death. Theseus himself died a “wretched” death, killed by a friend he was visiting, possibly because Athens had banished him (216). If they had, the Athenians eventually honored him with “a great tomb” that became “a sanctuary for slaves and for all poor and helpless people, in memory of one who through his life had been the protector of the defenseless” (217).
Chapter 3 Summary: “Hercules”
According to Hamilton, Hercules was Greece’s “greatest hero,” strong, confident, and, by his own reckoning, equal to the gods but overly emotional and unintelligent (218). Born in Thebes, Heracles was the son of Zeus and Alcmena, wife of Amphitryon. Zeus visited her in the guise of her husband, to whom she bore a second son, Iphicles. Hera hated Hercules for being Zeus’s son and, when the hero was a baby, sent two snakes to kill him in his crib, but Hercules gleefully strangled them. As a boy, he accidentally killed his music teacher. As a youth, he killed the Thespian lion, whose coat he wore ever after as a cloak, and conquered the Minyans, who had burdened Thebes with an excessive tribute. As thanks, he was given Megara as a wife, with whom he had three children, but Hera inflicted him with madness, and he killed them. He wanted to kill himself, but Theseus prevented him, bringing him briefly back to Athens.
The oracle at Delphi sent Hercules to his cousin Eurystheus, alternately the king of Mycenae or Tiryns, to be purified, and the tasks the king assigned him are known as “the Labors of Hercules” (225). These are 1) killing the Nemean Lion, 2) killing the Hydra of Lernea, 3) capturing alive one of Artemis’s sacred golden-horned stags, 4) capturing the Erymanthean boar, 5) cleaning out the Augean stables in a single day, 6) driving away the Stymphalian birds, 7) fetching the Cretan bull, 8) capturing Diomedes of Thrace’s man-eating mares, 9) delivering Amazonian queen Hippolyta’s girdle, 10) capturing the cattle of Geryon, 11) fetching the Hesperides’ Golden Apples (freeing Prometheus along the way), and 12) fetching Cerberus from the underworld. It was during this trip that he freed Theseus.
The labors do not constitute all of Hercules’s adventures and trials. He was also obliged to conquer the Giant Antaeus. After the wife of his friend Admetis died to extend her beloved husband’s life, Hercules brought her back to him. He battled the river-god Achelous over Deianira and rescued Trojan king Laomedon’s daughter from a sea monster in exchange for horses. After Laomedon broke his promise, Hercules sacked Troy. He accidentally killed a serving boy and deliberately killed a friend whose father, King Eurytus, insulted him. Hercules then sent himself into exile, becoming the slave of Lydian queen Omphale, but after he was freed, he conquered the king, captured his daughter Iole, and sent her to his wife. Deianira then accidentally poisoned Hercules with a cloak dipped in the blood of the Centaur Nessus, whom Hercules had killed. Nessus had claimed that his blood was a powerful love charm, but instead it poisoned Hercules. The pain caused him to kill himself atop a funeral pyre, after which he joined the gods.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Atalanta”
Atalanta was the daughter of alternately Iasus or Schoenius, who was so disappointed to have a daughter that he exposed her to die on Mount Parthenion. A bear nursed her until hunters adopted her, and Atalanta became a skilled hunter herself. She killed two Centaurs, who upon finding her alone pursued her, and joined the Caledonian boar hunt. She was the first to strike the boar. For this reason, and because he was in love with her, Meleager awarded her the animal’s hide, angering his uncles, who forbade him to do so. In retaliation, Meleager killed them, which in turn enraged his mother and their sister Althea. The Fates had appeared to her after Meleager was born telling her that his life would be as long as a piece of wood they cast into the fire. Althea had grabbed it from the flames and hidden it in a chest. Now, in her fury, she tossed it into the fire, and Meleager died.
Atalanta continued her adventures, possibly joining or being prevented from joining the quest for the Golden Fleece. At Pelias’s funeral games, she defeated Trojan war hero Achilles’ father Peleus in a wrestling match. Eventually reconciled with her father, he held foot races to determine who would marry her. Atalanta always defeated her would-be suitors until a young man, alternately called Melanion or Hippomenes, secured the help of Aphrodite. She gifted him three of the Hesperides’ golden apples to toss at Atalanta’s feet and distract her while they raced. In this way he won both the race and her hand in marriage. They had a son together, Parthenopaeus, who fought with the Seven against Thebes, and eventually were turned into lions after offending a god.
Part 3 Analysis
Four heroes from the generation before those of the Trojan war are introduced in this section, characteristic of Hamilton’s chronological approach to mythology.
Hamilton likens the myth of Perseus to a “fairy story,” presumably because of the happy ending of his and Andromeda’s myth, adding that it “seems to have been a great favorite in Greece” (189). She does not specify whether this was the case among Greek speakers of any time and place, or in the Greece of Archaic and Classical times, or in particular versions of their story. Characteristically, context is absent.
Unlike many of the mythological heroes, Perseus and Andromeda do not commit impious acts that cause them to fall afoul of the gods. Their story appears in both Ovid in Latin and Apollodorus in Greek, both sources from imperial Rome but told in very different contexts. Ovid was a poet who sought to showcase his skill and achieve acclaim in a relatively new superpower, while Apollodorus, whoever he was, appears to have been compiling a reference book for fellow Greeks to remember the glory days that were behind them. Hamilton dismisses Ovid’s retelling as “extremely verbose” and chose to take as her model Apollodorus’s “simple and straightforward” version (191). Effectively, she seems to be saying that Ovid’s excess of details and linguistic play runs counter to her intention to create a clear and organized account of the myths’ plots.
She also uses Apollodorus as her primary model for Theseus’s story, drawing on bits that appear in works by Ovid, Athenian tragedians Euripides and Sophocles, and Greek historian Plutarch (who lived from 45-120). The poetic, dramatic, and historical sources from which she selects plot points that she finds interesting and noteworthy represent both a range of socio-historical conditions and rhetorical agendas. Thus, Apollodorus indeed seems her best exemplar, as his project is more in line with her own: to compile information in a digestible and informative way, focusing on the stories and characters rather than situating them in their discrete contexts.
As Hamilton notes, Hercules was the great hero of Greece, and his story is frequently referenced in sources of all kinds. Homer cites him repeatedly, not so much to recount aspects of his myth but as a reference point against which other heroes measure themselves. To piece together his biography, so to speak, Hamilton turns again to Apollodorus. Other sources she mentions include Ovid, Euripides, the classical Theban poet of victory odes Pindar, and Alexandrian poet Theocritus. The biography of Atalanta also comes from Apollodorus as well as Ovid, with supplementary details provided by Hesiod and Homer.
Hamilton’s contrasting characterizations of Theseus and Hercules reflect her agenda to tie mythical stories to what she calls “Western civilization.” Hercules “showed greatness of soul” in that he humbly submitted to punishment for his excesses, but he lacked intelligence and was overly emotional, flying into sudden rages, committing outrages, then feeling penitent. For this reason, Hamilton concludes that Hercules could never have been a good leader since he was evidently incapable of commanding even himself. By contrast, Theseus is a great exemplar of Athenian values, the precursor of and foundation for Western civilization, as Hamilton frames it. Theseus was brave, intelligent, compassionate, and strong.
To craft this contrast essential to her thematic intentions for the collection, Hamilton must ignore the myth-ritual connection that Hercules embodies. In the case of Hercules, his heroic journey provides what could be interpreted as a Panhellenic model of the transition heroes undergo from being figures of myth to being figures of ritual. The template Hercules’ story provides can be understood as follows: A half mortal, half divine hero is born. He or she has a divine antagonist who hounds him/her while alive, provoking him/her to commit outrages. After the hero’s death, the hero and the divine antagonist are reconciled. The hero is immortalized, and a cult is established to honor said hero. It is possible that any hero from any city state could be modeled on Hercules. In addition, because he wandered so far and wide, he came into contact with other heroes possibly associated with numerous city states, any of which could then capitalize on his prestige by linking their local heroes to him. Hercules’ myth, then, could be relevant and important for Greeks not only because of Hercules himself but because of the links he forged among city states that saw themselves as belonging to a larger cultural, if not administrative, group.
Hamilton’s Theseus-Hercules contrast also depends on overlooking the less savory elements of Theseus’s story. She highlights Theseus’s great democratic ideals and model but quickly skims over his abandonment of Ariadne, selecting a variant that frames him leaving her by necessity but returning to find that she has died. Similarly, Hamilton qualifies his abduction of Helen when she was a child by adding the detail that Theseus did not intend to marry her until many years later. This reveals one of the problems of approaching hero “biographies” outside their context: It inevitably requires handpicking details, overestimating some and overlooking others, as suits the teller’s narrative intentions. This is an approach storytellers have continued into the present day and can be considered fair play. Incongruities surface, however, when storytellers, whether Hamilton or others, adopt essentialist approaches to the heroes, attempting to divine their “true” natures divorced from context. The vast body of sources that explore these heroes belie these attempts. As Hamilton’s text and the dizzying array of sources she draws on reveal, these figures, when they are contained within a single narrative, necessarily become creatures of the storyteller’s imagination and a reflection of the value system out of which that storyteller functions.
