The Library (Bibliotheca)

Summary

The Library is the only complete handbook of Greek mythology to survive from antiquity. In plain, compressed prose it tells the traditional stories of the gods and heroes in order, from the beginning of the world to the death of Odysseus, organized chiefly by family lines. Book I begins with Sky and Earth and their children, the Hundred-handed, the Cyclopes and the Titans; Cronus castrates his father and swallows his own children until Zeus, hidden in a Cretan cave, overthrows him. It then narrates the wars against the Giants and the monster Typhon, Prometheus's making of men and theft of fire, the flood survived by Deucalion and Pyrrha, and the descendants of Hellen, including the Calydonian boar hunt and Meleager, and ends with the full voyage of the Argonauts: Jason, the Golden Fleece, Medea, and their flight to Corinth. Book II follows the descendants of Inachus of Argos: Io, Danaus and his fifty daughters, Proetus and the maddened daughters whom the seer Melampus heals, Bellerophon, and Perseus with the Gorgon's head; then the longest single narrative in the work, the life of Heracles, his madness and killing of his children, the twelve labours for Eurystheus, his later adventures, his death on Mount Oeta and his deification, followed by the return of his descendants to the Peloponnese. Book III begins with the line of Agenor: Europa and the bull, Cadmus founding Thebes, the birth of Dionysus and the punishment of those who resisted him, Oedipus and the Sphinx's riddle, the Seven against Thebes and the Epigoni. It continues with the Arcadian families, the birth of Hermes, Asclepius the healer who raised the dead and was struck down by Zeus, the Spartan line of Tyndareus, Helen and the Dioscuri, the early kings of Athens, and Minos of Crete, breaking off in the story of Theseus. The rest survives only in an Epitome, a summary recovered from two Byzantine manuscripts in the 1880s and 1890s: Theseus and the Minotaur, the house of Pelops and Atreus, the causes and course of the Trojan War, the Wooden Horse and the sack of Troy, the returns of the Greek leaders, and the wanderings and death of Odysseus. The author constantly records variant versions and names his sources, among them Hesiod, Pherecydes, Acusilaus, Stesichorus and the tragic poets, which makes the Library a guide to lost early Greek literature. The library text is Sir James George Frazer's Loeb translation of 1921, without his extensive notes and appendices.

Top Lessons

• A map of the myths

  The Library arranges hundreds of myths by family trees, so the reader sees how Perseus, Heracles, Oedipus and Agamemnon belong to connected houses. It is the backbone behind the epics and tragedies, and reading it shows how the Greeks thought of their past as a vast genealogy.

• Many versions, honestly reported

  The author repeatedly says 'some say' and names Hesiod, Acusilaus, Pherecydes or Euripides for different versions, as with the cause of the madness of Proetus's daughters. The Library models careful scholarship that records disagreement instead of hiding it.

• Pride and its limits

  Again and again mortals who compete with gods, from Niobe to the resisters of Dionysus, are destroyed, and even the healer Asclepius is struck down when he raises the dead. The Library records a world in which the boundary between human and divine must not be crossed.

• Labour and endurance

  Heracles performs his labours as penance after killing his children in madness, and is promised immortality when they are done. The Library presents heroic endurance as a path through guilt toward a reward.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The Library preserves several founding legends of Greek medicine and madness. Melampus is called the first to cure by drugs and purifications, and his cure of the daughters of Proetus, who wander the countryside in a frenzy, is achieved by a chase with shouts and frenzied dancing followed by purification; the Library reports two religious causes for their madness (rejecting the rites of Dionysus, according to Hesiod, or slighting Hera's image, according to Acusilaus), and the story is an early document of the idea that madness can be treated. Asclepius, trained by Chiron in healing and called a surgeon, raises the dead with the Gorgon's blood, using the blood of one side as a poison and of the other as a cure, until Zeus kills him lest men rescue one another from death; the episode stands at the head of the long debate about the proper limits of medicine. Chiron's incurable arrow wound, the regrowing liver of Prometheus, the divine madness that drives Heracles, Lycurgus, Agave and the Argive women to kill, and the Furies that pursue Alcmaeon after matricide show the Greek habit of describing mental disturbance as sent by gods. These are mythical narratives; modern labels for them are interpretations.

• Book II.2.2

  The daughters of Proetus go mad and roam the land; Melampus demands a share of the kingdom, then cures them by a pursuit and purification, though the eldest dies.

• Book III.10.3-4

  Asclepius learns healing from Chiron, raises the dead with the Gorgon's blood, and is struck down by Zeus.

• Book II.4.12

  Heracles, driven mad by Hera, throws his own children into the fire and goes into exile for purification.

• Book II.5.4

  Heracles accidentally wounds Chiron with a poisoned arrow; the medicine fails, and the immortal centaur longs to die.

• Book I.7.1

  An eagle daily devours the lobes of Prometheus's liver, which grow again by night.