The Greek Myths

The Greek Myths (1955) is a mythography, a compendium of Greek mythology, with comments and analyses, by the poet and writer Robert Graves, normally published in two volumes, though there are abridged editions that present the myths only.

Each myth is presented in the voice of a narrator writing under the Antonines, such as Plutarch or Pausanias, with citations of the classical sources. The literary quality of these retellings is generally praised.

Each myth is followed by Graves's interpretation of its origin and significance, following his theories on a prehistoric Matriarchal religion as presented in his book White Goddess and elsewhere. These theories and his etymologies are generally rejected by classical scholars, but Graves dismissed such criticism, arguing that by definition classical scholars lack "the poetic capacity to forensically examine mythology".

Graves interpreted Bronze Age Greece as changing from a matriarchal society under the Pelasgians to a patriarchal one under continual pressure from victorious Greek-speaking tribes. In the second stage local kings came to each settlement as foreign princes, reigned by marrying the hereditary queen, who represented the Triple Goddess, and were ritually slain by the next king after a limited period, originally six months. Kings managed to evade the sacrifice for longer and longer periods, often by sacrificing substitutes, and eventually converted the queen, priestess of the Goddess, into a subservient and chaste wife, and in the final stage had legitimate sons to reign after them.

The Greek Myths presents the myths as stories from the ritual of all three stages, and often as historical records of the otherwise unattested struggles between Greek kings and the Moon-priestesses. In some cases Graves conjectures a process of "iconotropy", or image-turning, by which a hypothetical cult image of the matriarchal or matrilineal period has been misread by later Greeks in their own terms. Thus, for example, he conjectures an image of divine twins struggling in the womb of the Horse-Goddess, which later gave rise to the myth of the Trojan Horse.

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