Edith set out to create an entirely new version only of Thomas Bulfinch’s first mythology book, The Age of Fable, which had contained Greek, Roman, and Norse myths. Bulfinch, who had received his education in classics at the Boston Latin School and at Harvard, had died in 1867, the year Edith was born. He had been a Boston bank clerk when he had published The Age of Fable, which was subsequently revised many times; the title Bulfinch’s Mythology was generally used for later editions of the work, which included not only the myths of the first volume but also Bulfinch’s later works The Age of Chivalry and Legends of Charlemagne, initially published in 1858 and 18631 respectively. Edith’s model was confined to The Age of Fable since she originally intended to include only the Greek and Roman myths, with the brief section on Norse mythology a slightly later addition.
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The project’s attraction lay in its subject’s wide appeal: mythology was an aspect of ancient Greek culture with which a potentially large reading audience hoped to become more familiar. As Bulfinch’s biographer Marie Sally Cleary has pointed out, one reason for the success of The Age of Fable was the existence of a public cager to better understand
mythological references in Western art and literature. By writing a new mythology book, Edith could tap into the primary means by which readers became curious about ancient Greece. Bulfinch had aided his readers’ quest for greater appreciation of art and literature by including quotations from poems that alluded to a myth before his telling of each story, something that Edith also originally intended to do in her volume. Instead, she commented on the sources for each story, identifying the ancient authors from whom she had drawn the tale, a change that indicated the ultimate limits of Bulfinch as her model. As she began work on the book it quickly became apparent that in terms of content she would vary considerably from the earlier author.Edith found Bulfinch’s work readable but felt that the large number of quotations from poetry actually defeated the purpose of making the subject of mythology accessible to readers. Edith’s approach was therefore the opposite of Bulfinch’s. Rather than providing excerpts from the poems inspired by a particular tale, she imagined the reader encountering a reference to a myth in either art or literature and subsequently wishing to read only the story, not other allusions to it. Nevertheless, she was conscious of which mythological tales a potential reader might encounter, causing her to include at least one story that Bulfinch had left out: the tale of Amphitryon, whose wife Alcmena bore a son, the hero Hercules, by Zeus. Finding Bulfinch occasionally old-fashioned, she felt he had omitted the tale, along with the Roman story of Lucretia, because both narratives revolved around tests of a woman’s virtue. Edith, however, initially planned to include both tales, as she felt there were many allusions to both characters in English poetry, though only the story of Amphitryon appeared in Mythology.
She also wanted to arrange the stories differently than Bulfinch, paying more attention to chronology, beginning with what could be identified by authorship as the oldest tales, the ones drawn from the Homeric Hymns and from Hesiod. She also wanted to add more context before each story, explaining “the way the myths may have originated and the way they have developed.” By late 1938, she already envisioned, she told Everitt, “a book a little more grown-up than Bulfinch, but only a little.”
Only in two respects was Bulfinch’s work a definite model. Edith, like Bulfinch, wrote a lengthy section at the beginning of the book describing the attributes of the gods and goddesses and the other lesser divinities. Also, from its inception Everitt felt that Mythology should have illustrations. Ultimately, the publisher commissioned Steele Savage, who had illustrated Sally Benson’s mythology book three years earlier, to create the artwork for Edith’s volume.
Bulfinch’s influence on the content and the length of Edith’s work was limited. For the latter, she turned to Charles Mills Gayley’s Classic Myths as a guide. It was a work with which she was familiar, having told its stories to Dorian and the other Reid children…
As Edith researched Mythology, she compiled lists of the stories she wanted to include. In the first pages of her notebook she listed forty-four stories under the heading “Done,” including the fifteen tales comprising Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece. She also made notes of stories she had yet to write, organized into “Important,” “Fairly Important,” and “Unimportant:’ Included under the heading “Important” were such myths as Hercules, Perseus, Phaeton, and the legend of Theseus. These were all included in the final volume, but some of the tales that she listed as “Unimportant,” such as the story of King Midas or those of Callisto or Antiope, nevertheless found their way into Mythology in the sections titled “The Less Important Myths” and “Brief Myths.” She found other ways to include stories that she had labeled “Fairly Important” in the book. As Edith organized her material, she found that the stories of Ceyx and Alcyone, and Pygmalion and Galatea, rounded out the section titled “Eight Brief Tales of Lovers.” This section also included myths she had listed as “important,” including Pyramis and Thisbe and the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. She also made lists of characters or mythological creatures she wanted to research, such as Orion, Astraea, and the Cranes of lbycus. When she finished writing a story, she crossed it off her list. Concern about the length of the mythology book, however, meant that some myths had to be excluded. Edith was always cautious about the length of Mythology, feeling too large a volume would defeat the purpose of making the subject accessible.
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Edith found the Norse portion of the volume the most challenging to write. Initially, she had not planned to include it at all. Norse mythology was not a subject with which she felt familiar, having gained her knowledge of it largely through listening to Wagnerian opera. She had, however, likely read the Germania of the Roman historian Tacitus, which described the rituals used in worshipping the Norse gods. Both Bulfinch and Gayley had included Norse mythology in their own books, one reason why Edith may have at last added it to hers. The time period in which she wrote Mythology suggests another. Interest in Norse mythology revived with the rise of Nazism in Germany, making it a potentially contentious subject on which to write. A section on Norse mythology, however, would help readers to at least understand some of the Third Reich’s symbolism.
Edith, in her introduction to the section on Norse mythology, drew a sharp dichotomy between the culture that had produced these tales and Christianity. She painted a picture of the early Christians as almost completely successful in their efforts to stamp out the literature of the pre-Christian Norse on the European continent. The result of this struggle, Edith argued, was that Christians drew no inspiration from Norse culture. The Nazis might use it for their symbolism, but they were drawing on a cultural tradition completely different from Christianity.
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Brevity, however, was not the only criticism offered of the section of Norse myths. Padraic Colum, the folklorist and poet of the nationalist Irish Renaissance, who taught comparative literature at Columbia University, was more critical of it in his review published in an August issue of the Saturday Review of Literature. Colum had had no formal training in the classics but was nevertheless drawn to the ancient world. he had published several books of Greek myths for a juvenile audience and a book of Norse mythology, The Children of Odin, which had appeared in 1920. Colum had considerable success as a children’s writer and Edith was certainly aware of his work, which she referred to in her own notes for Mythology.
Colum was critical of Edith’s introduction to the section of Norse mythology, calling it “wrong-headed in a way surprising to find in the work of a scholar such as Miss Hamilton.” He was dismayed that Edith had described the English as a primarily Teutonic people, a claim he disputed, along with Edith’s use of Norse and Teutonic as virtual synonyms. In Edith’s conception of “Teutonic,” Colum saw, correctly, the influence of Charles Kingsley, who had briefly referred to both the eddas and the sagas as well as to Beowulf in his introduction to The Heroes, without distinguishing among the cultures that produced them. Colum, probably also reacting to the rise of Nazis and their racial theories, opposed Kingsley’s conception of “muscular Christianity”: firm belief in both Protestantism and the physical and mental superiority of the Teutonic peoples. Moreover, he strongly disagreed with Edith’s assertion that Christians had seen Christianity in conflict with Norse mythology to such an extent that clergy had expended much effort in stamping out the Norse tales. Colum used Ireland as an example of where Christian theology and Norse mythology had coexisted, with the clergy actually preserving Norse literature. Edith, however had been mainly interested in separating Christianity and Norse mythology in Germany itself, where the Nazis were using the Norse literature to create a mythology of their own.
Colum understood the fundamental purpose of Edith’s book: to provide a reference for readers seeking to understand mythological allusions in other works of literature. He praised the volume as a thorough survey of Greek and Roman mythology, singling out especially Edith’s rendition of the story of the maiden Marpessa who, urged by Zeus to choose between her two suitors, Apollo and a mortal named Idas, one of the Argonauts, chose the latter. It was a myth that Edith had labeled “unimportant” in her own notes for the manuscript, and it appeared in “Brief Myths Arranged Alphabetically” at the end of the book. Similarly, Colum welcomed Edith’s clarification of another myth that involved violence against women, the story of Procne and Philomela, daughters of King Erechtbeus of Athens, who were both transformed into birds to escape the vengeance of Procne’s husband, Tereus. In his anger, Tereus had cut out Philomela’s tongue, but she had been nevertheless described by Roman and later English poets as the nightingale. In the Greek story, the gods had turned Philomela into a swallow, a bird that cannot sing, while Procne had become the nightingale.
Mythology proved to be Edith’s most enduring book despite the contemporary references in some of the stories. Edith’s opposition to fascism was particularly noticeable in her telling of the tale of Prometheus, chained to a mountainside in the Caucasus for giving humans the gift of fire and for refusing to reveal the name of the mother who would bear a son who would challenge Zeus. For these, Prometheus was viewed as the friend of humanity and a symbol of free thought as opposed to tyranny.88 This had been evident to her when she had translated the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus but was more pronounced in Mythology, since the Nazis made use of Prometheus as an ”Aryan,” helping to bring forth Western civilization. Edith therefore constructed a Prometheus who stood for spiritual freedom, one who “has stood through all the centuries, from Greek days to our own, as that of the great rebel against injustice and the authority of power.” She would echo similar sentiments in her speech in Athens in 1957 as she received her honorary citizenship to the city before a performance of her translation of Prometheus Bound.
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More importantly for Edith, Edward Caird had compared the moral impacts of the deaths of Socrates and Jesus.
Edith saw Socrates and Jesus as sharing the same method of teaching through the example of their own lives. Neither told individuals what to believe but instead urged others to seek the truth as they did. Both sought to help individuals do so, not by retiring from society but by being active in its daily life. Socrates flourished in fifth century BCE Athens, whose citizens were eager to engage in philosophical discussion with him, even as war began between Athens and Sparta. Edith was quick to point out that, in times of war, philosophical discussion, with its exchange of ideas, was even more vital than in times of peace.
Initially, war had not stopped the circulation of ideas on which the Athenians thrived. The staggering length of the Peloponnesian War, which lasted twenty-seven years, and its conclusion in the defeat of Athens however, produced a sea change in the city’s values, the kind of societal moral shift to which Edith was always sensitive. The Athenians sentenced Socrates to death five years after the war’s conclusion. To Edith, the reason for this sentence, corrupting the young through the introduction of new gods, only supported her argument that Socrates’s method had helped lay the groundwork for Christianity. The Olympic gods, she had argued in her introduction to Mythology, had ultimately been unable to fulfill human longing for a divinity who protected humanity and who both stood for and demanded ethical behavior. Socrates, by urging the young of Athens to search for the good, had discarded the official religion of Athens, as belief in “Homer’s jovial, amoral Olympians [was] impossible for any thinking person to take seriously.”
In defeat, however, Athenians treated Socrates with suspicion. He had no fixed dogmas or creeds to substitute for the gods he had discarded. Instead, he offered only a method of questioning, of searching for the good. As Edith explained to Storer a few months before Witness to the Truth was published, “Socrates by temperament and his basic point of view was closer to Christ than anyone else. I believe he is a help to understanding Christ, a stepping-stone to an apprehension of that greatest of all figures.
Throughout Witness to the Truth, Edith offered her readers various solutions to the challenges of maintaining Christian faith. In the book’s third chapter, “How the Gospels Were Written;’ she explained how to approach reading the Gospels, to which various additions had been made over time, including recitations of miracles and messianic predictions. She identified the list of miracles at the end of the Gospel of Mark as one of these later additions, arguing that the “entire passage is on a level immeasurably below the rest of the Gospel” and that as early as the fourth century it was recognized as being a substitute for the original ending of Mark, which had been lost. The persecutions that Mark and other Christians experienced in the first century of the Roman Empire accounted for the Gospel’s messianic statements. But Jesus, Edith argued, was independent of concern for time and place. “If Christ is here for the modern world, it is because he is independent of changes of time and stages of knowledge. Today it is impossible to find a refuge from the evils of the world in an expectation that presently God will intervene to destroy the wicked and exalt the good.” Belief in Jesus’s message, she argued, should not be dependent on the supernatural.
Quotes from American Classicist: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton by Victoria Houseman
