Greek Mythology

Abstract

Abstract With the possible exception of the Vedic-Hindu religion of India, the religion or religions associated with the ancient Greeks produced the world’s most complex and sophisticated mythology. Usually the Greek myths are read as individual stories. Only when we read them all in a book such as Robert Graves’s Greek Myths do we become aware that Greek mythology is, in fact, a single, gradually composed saga of the folk imagination and many talented authors, in which characters and events from the beginning of conceived time are interrelated in a complex web that touches on every imaginable aspect of the human experience. The early mythology of the ancient Greeks, that of the so-called archaic and classical periods of the middle and late Iron Age, was preceded by several Bronze Age or Helladic stages attached to particular geographic areas in the land we now call Greece.