Classical myth has no scripture. It survives as a set of competing texts written centuries apart, in two languages, by authors with different purposes — and most confusion about it comes from expecting a single canonical version that never existed. Hesiod systematises; Homer assumes you already know the story; Ovid retells for literary effect and often invents the version everyone now remembers. So the useful question about any myth is rarely "what happens" but **"whose telling is this, and what were they doing with it"**. Read this for the shape of the tradition and the joints where its versions disagree; the individual stories are much easier to hold once you know which text they come from.
Each chapter opens with the short version. Tap one to read the detail.
The succession myth: three generations, one pattern
~2 min
The creation story is a sequence of sons overthrowing fathers, and it stops when
The twelve, and why the list is not fixed
~2 min
The Olympians are conventionally twelve, but the roster varies between sources — Hestia and Dionysus are the usual swap. Their domains come from a three-way division of the cosmos among the brothers, and everything else distributes from there.
Hero cycles, and the crime that starts them
~2 min
A hero cycle usually begins with pollution — a crime, often divinely caused — and the labours are expiation rather than adventure. Heracles' twelve are the model: assigned by a king, imposed as penance, and structured as a list.
The war, and the poem that covers two weeks of it
~2 min
The *Iliad* is not the story of the Trojan War. It covers a few weeks in the tenth year, structured around Achilles' withdrawal and return — and it assumes you already know the rest.
A homecoming told out of order
~2 min
The *Odyssey* is structured, not linear: it opens in the middle, gives the famous adventures as a flashback narrated by Odysseus himself, and spends its second half on a siege of his own household.
The geography of the afterlife
~2 min
The underworld is a mapped place with rivers, a gate, a ferryman and distinct regions. Its rules are mostly about *transit* — who may cross, at what price, and what happens to those who cannot.
Monsters as puzzles, not obstacles
~2 min
The memorable creatures each pose a specific problem that ordinary force cannot solve, and the hero's answer is usually a workaround. The monster's defining trait *is* the puzzle.
Ovid, and why his version is the one you know
~2 min
The *Metamorphoses* is a continuous Latin poem running from creation to Caesar, linked by transformation. Many stories everyone treats as "Greek myth" survive mainly in Ovid's retelling — literary, Roman, and centuries later.
Roman myth: foundation, not cosmology
~2 min
Roman legend is preoccupied with the founding and legitimacy of Rome rather than with cosmic origins. The *Aeneid* deliberately links Rome to Troy, which makes it a political argument as much as an epic.
Which text, and how sure can you be
~2 min
The tradition's disagreements are the substance, not noise. Hesiod systematises, Homer assumes, the *Bibliotheca* compiles, and Ovid reinvents — so "the myth" is usually shorthand for one of several incompatible versions.
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