Who Wrote the Myths Down

Homer's Iliad and Odyssey supply the heroic frame; Hesiod's Theogony supplies the divine family tree. The Homeric Hymns, short devotional poems to individual gods, add detail the epics leave out. Pindar's victory odes turn local legends into public praise.

Greek tragedy is a major source as well as an interpretation. Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides took familiar plots and pushed them to extremes, preserving variants that would otherwise be lost.

Virgil's Aeneid gave Rome its own epic and rewrote myth as imperial destiny. Ovid's Metamorphoses gathered Greek legends into a single continuous narrative that became Europe's standard handbook. Seneca's tragedies, Statius' Thebaid and Lucan's Pharsalia kept the tradition alive under the emperors.

Because these works were read continuously through the Middle Ages, they shaped what later Europe assumed 'Greek myth' was.

Prose writers filled the gaps. Herodotus reports what Greeks said about their gods and their past, frequently with scepticism. Diodorus and Apollodorus compiled systematic mythographies; Apollodorus' Bibliotheca is a dry but indispensable catalogue.

Pausanias, writing in the second century CE, toured Greek sanctuaries and recorded the statues, altars and local stories he saw — an ancient travel guide that preserves regional variants no poet bothered with. In Latin, Hyginus' Fabulae offers terse summaries clearly meant for reference.

No original papyrus of Homer survives. Texts passed through copies and commentaries: Hellenistic scholars in Alexandria edited Homer; Roman and Byzantine scribes copied manuscripts by hand; monasteries and imperial libraries preserved a fraction of what had existed.

The Renaissance rediscovered these manuscripts, and the printing press multiplied them. Papyri recovered from Egyptian rubbish dumps and the charred scrolls of Herculaneum continue to add new lines. Every modern retelling of a Greek myth sits at the end of that chain.