The Age of Fable

Summary

The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes, is Thomas Bulfinch's prose retelling of Greek and Roman mythology, with shorter chapters on Egyptian, Eastern, Norse and Celtic belief, first published in Boston in 1855. Bulfinch, a bank clerk with a Harvard classical education, wrote it so that ordinary readers could understand the mythological allusions in English poetry and speech. His preface explains that the book is not for scholars, theologians or philosophers but for readers of English literature, and that stories offensive to good morals are left out. The introduction sketches the Greek picture of the world and the Olympian gods with their Latin names, which Bulfinch uses throughout (Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Venus). The next chapters follow Ovid's Metamorphoses closely: Prometheus and Pandora and the flood of Deucalion; Apollo and Daphne; Pyramus and Thisbe; Io, Callisto and Actaeon; Phaeton's disastrous drive of the Sun's chariot; Midas and the golden touch; Baucis and Philemon, who ask to die in the same hour; Proserpine carried off by Pluto; Pygmalion; Ceyx and Halcyone; and Echo and Narcissus. A whole chapter retells Apuleius's Cupid and Psyche, which Bulfinch reads as an allegory of the soul purified by suffering. Hero chapters follow: Cadmus and the Myrmidons, Perseus and Medusa, the monsters, Jason and the Golden Fleece with Medea, Meleager and Atalanta, Hercules, Theseus and Daedalus, and Bacchus and Ariadne. Later chapters treat the rural and water deities, Orpheus and Eurydice, the poets Arion and Sappho, and then the Trojan War, the fall of Troy, the wanderings of Ulysses and the voyage of Aeneas, drawn from Homer and Virgil, including the descent to the underworld with the Sibyl and the war with Turnus. Bulfinch then turns to Pythagoras, Egyptian deities and the oracles, a chapter on theories of the origin of mythology and on famous statues and poets, and one on the fabulous beasts of later lore such as the phoenix and the unicorn. A chapter on Eastern mythology describes Zoroaster, Hindu deities and the Buddha. The Norse chapters tell of Valhalla, Thor's visit to Jotunheim and the death of Baldur; the last chapter concerns the Druids and Iona. Throughout, Bulfinch sets passages of English poetry beside the myths, from Spenser, Milton, Pope, Byron, Keats, Tennyson and Longfellow, to show how the stories live in English verse. The library text is a later complete edition whose publishers added a section on the Nibelungen Lied and Wagner's Ring and replaced the index with a glossary of proper names; it contains The Age of Fable only.

Top Lessons

• Mythology as the handmaid of literature

  Bulfinch wrote for readers who met Niobe, Psyche or Pegasus in Milton, Byron or a public speech and did not know the story. His book teaches that English literature is full of classical allusion and that knowing the myths opens it. He sets lines of English verse after almost every tale so the reader sees the myth at work.

• Phaeton and the father's fearful gift

  Apollo swears by the Styx to grant his son any wish and then cannot refuse when Phaeton asks for the Sun's chariot. The father pleads that his fear is the best proof of his love, but the boy insists and the world burns. The story teaches the danger of rash promises and of pride that demands proof.

• Baucis and Philemon's open door

  Jupiter and Mercury, disguised as travellers, are turned away from every house in a Phrygian village until an old couple shares its little food with them. The poor cottage becomes a temple and their one wish, to die together, is granted. The story honours hospitality and faithful married love.

• Psyche, the soul purified by suffering

  Psyche loses Cupid through curiosity and doubt and wins him back by enduring Venus's impossible tasks. Bulfinch points out that her name means both butterfly and soul and reads the tale as a picture of the soul that is purified by misfortune and prepared for true happiness. The chapter shows how nineteenth-century readers found moral allegory in pagan myth.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Because Bulfinch condenses so much of Ovid, the book gathers in one place several of the ancient world's most influential medical myths, filtered through a Boston layman of the 1850s. Apollo is god of medicine as well as music, and Bulfinch explains the pairing with verses by the physician-poet John Armstrong. Chiron teaches Aesculapius, who becomes so skilled that he raises the dead and is struck down by Jupiter, an early fable of medicine overreaching its limits. The plague of Aegina, taken from Ovid, describes fever, swollen tongues, contagion that kills the physicians, and despair. Erisichthon is punished with insatiable Famine. The chapter on oracles describes incubation at Epidaurus, where the sick slept in the temple for healing, and Bulfinch remarks that the treatment has been compared to animal magnetism or mesmerism, a revealing comparison from the decade when mesmerism was still debated in America. Niobe's petrified grief and Orpheus's mourning offer classical images of bereavement. Medical readings of the myths are interpretive.

• Chapter III, Apollo and Daphne

  Bulfinch explains why medicine belongs to Apollo's province, quoting the physician-poet Armstrong on music that allays grief and expels disease.

• Chapter XII, Cadmus--The Myrmidons

  Aeacus narrates the plague of Aegina: corrupted air and water, the death of animals first, fever and thirst, contagion that kills the physicians, and the collapse of social restraint.

• Chapter XVI, Monsters (Centaurs); Chapter XXIII, Admetus and Alcestis

  Chiron the centaur, skilled in medicine, raises the infant Aesculapius; Aesculapius later restores the dead to life and is killed by Jupiter's thunderbolt.

• Chapter XXII, Erisichthon

  Ceres sends Famine to a man who cut down her sacred oak; his hunger grows with every meal until he devours his own body.

• Chapter XXXIV, Oracle of Aesculapius

  The sick sleep in the temple at Epidaurus to receive healing responses; Bulfinch compares the cure to mesmerism and tells how the god's serpent came to Rome in a time of pestilence.

• Chapter XXVI, Aurora and Tithonus

  Tithonus is granted immortality without youth and withers into extreme old age.