A Brief Guide to the Greek Myths

The introduction opens with humour: the author quotes a Greek tourism advert and shows how Greek myth surrounds us in the 21st century — “Trojan horses” threaten our computers, “Ajax” is both a cleaning product and a Dutch football club, we all have an “Achilles heel”, and centaurs decorate the pages of Narnia and Harry Potter. Opera, ballet, film, jazz and rock all draw on the myths. The conclusion is short: “there's no escaping Greek mythology”. The introduction also explains the book's three-part structure and the problem of Latinised Greek names (Akhilleus rather than Achilles, Oidipous rather than Oedipus).

Part one begins with a simple observation: a Greek of the fifth century BC would hardly have needed such a book — mythology was the air they breathed. The author then lists the main sources through which the myths reach us: Homer, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, Pindar, Herodotus, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Callimachus, Apollonius of Rhodes, Theocritus, Virgil, Ovid, Plutarch and Pausanias. This list is the key to all the later chapters: every myth has several versions, and it matters who told which one, when and why.

At the centre of the part is the history of the word “myth”. Kershaw shows that the Greek mythos originally meant simply “something said”, “speech”: in Homer, the words of the servant answering Hector and Achilles' refusal to return to battle are both mythos. Thucydides, describing his own history as free of the “mythical”, is the first to link myth with frivolous storytelling. The quotation from Plato's Republic is striking: Socrates proposes censoring the tales mothers and nurses tell children — such is the power of myth.

Kershaw tries to separate myth from other kinds of story, with highly entertaining examples. Fairy tales begin “once upon a time”, give no place or date, and have generic heroes like Jack, the Giant or Little Red Riding Hood. Legends are more worldly. Aesop's fables, anecdotes such as Xerxes ordering the Hellespont to be given three hundred lashes, and ancient Greek jokes from the Philogelos (“Laughter-Lover”) collection illustrate the differences. The conclusion is close to Walter Burkert's definition: a myth is a traditional tale with secondary, partial reference to something of collective importance. Kershaw's own formula: “a myth is a socially powerful traditional story”.

The finest idea of the part comes at the end: what makes Greek myths mythical is not the gods, talking animals or magic, but the women and men of the very distant past — extraordinary women and men. Kershaw recalls Aristotle: in ancient times only the leaders were heroes, while the rest of the people were merely men. This approach shapes the whole book: myths are stories about human beings.

The book's weaknesses are visible too. The Turkish edition, is full of letter errors, some maps and tables are illegible, and the translation has heavy sentences. It is long, and some chapters are weighed down with genealogies. In addition, the final chapter on Plato's Atlantis overlaps with the author's separate book on Atlantis. Even so, this is one of the best guides to Greek myth — one to read and to keep for reference.

• A chronological, ordered presentation of the myths
• Careful references to ancient sources for every story
• A humorous style rich in examples from modern culture