Mythology by Edith Hamilton: A Complete Guide and Review

Who Was Edith Hamilton?

Edith Hamilton (1867-1963) was one of the most remarkable classical scholars of the 20th century. Born in Dresden, Germany, to American parents, she grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where her father made ancient Greek and Latin part of the family's regular study alongside English, French, and German. By the time she was seven years old, she was reading Julius Caesar in Latin.

She attended Bryn Mawr College, then one of the few institutions in the United States that seriously educated women in classical languages and scholarship. She later studied at the University of Munich, becoming one of the first women admitted to study there. She returned to Bryn Mawr as a teacher and eventually became headmistress of the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore, a position she held for 26 years.

What is most remarkable about Hamilton's literary career is when it began. She did not publish her first book until she was 62 years old. The Greek Way appeared in 1930, when Hamilton had already retired from the school. Mythology came in 1942 when she was 74. The Roman Way, The Prophets of Israel, and The Echo of Greece followed. She was still writing when she was in her nineties.

Hamilton received the Greek government's highest civilian honor, the Golden Cross of the Order of Benefaction, in 1957, and in 1961, at age 94, she was made an honorary citizen of Athens. She died in 1963. Her books remain in print, with Mythology alone selling hundreds of thousands of copies per year, making it among the longest-continuously-selling books on classical mythology in the world.

Structure and Scope of the Book

Hamilton's Mythology is organized in seven parts, moving from creation and cosmology through the major divine and heroic figures, the great war cycles, the tragic dramatists' versions of the myths, and concluding with Norse mythology.

Part One: The Gods, the Creation, and the Earliest Heroes. Opens with the Greek creation myth, the Titans and the war with the Olympians, and then profiles each of the twelve Olympian gods individually. This is perhaps the most practically useful section of the book as a reference: when a reader encounters Hermes or Athena in any subsequent reading of classical literature, this is where to come for background.

Part Two: Stories of Love and Adventure. Covers Cupid and Psyche, Pyramus and Thisbe, Orpheus and Eurydice, Pygmalion, and a series of other romance-centered myths. Hamilton draws heavily on Ovid for this section, since Ovid was the primary transmitter of these stories in their most developed form.

Part Three: The Great Heroes Before the Trojan War. Perseus, Theseus, and Hercules each receive extended treatment, as does the Argonauts' quest for the Golden Fleece. These are among the most fully told stories in the book, with Hamilton moving fluidly between Homer, Pindar, and later sources to construct complete narrative accounts.

Part Four: The Heroes of the Trojan War. Covers the causes of the war, the Iliad's major episodes, the deaths of Achilles and Ajax, the fall of Troy, and the returns of the Greek heroes. The Odyssey receives extended coverage in its own right. This section is the densest in the book and will be the most familiar to readers who have read Homer previously.

Part Five: The Great Families of Mythology. Covers the houses of Oedipus, Agamemnon, and Tantalus, with Hamilton drawing primarily on the Greek tragedians (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides) for her material. These myths are among the most psychologically rich in the Greek tradition and Hamilton handles them with appropriate gravity.

Part Six: The Less Important Myths. A miscellany of myths that don't fit neatly into the earlier categories - Midas, Narcissus, Hyacinth, Endymion, and others. Some of the most beautiful and psychologically interesting Greek stories appear here despite the humble section title.

Part Seven: The Mythology of the Norsemen. A shorter section covering Norse cosmogony, the Aesir gods (Odin, Thor, Loki), the myths of Sigurd and Brynhild, and the apocalyptic vision of Ragnarok. Hamilton uses the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson as her primary source here.

The Olympian Gods: Hamilton's Portraits

Hamilton's individual portraits of the Olympian gods are among the most frequently quoted sections of the book, and for good reason: she manages to convey the character of each deity with precision and with genuine appreciation for their complexity.

Zeus is presented not as the all-knowing, all-powerful deity that later monotheistic traditions would substitute for the Greek pantheon, but as a powerful but limited ruler whose authority is constantly contested and whose personal behavior is frequently undignified. His affairs, his tempers, and his occasional compliance with the demands of fate all give him a human dimension that makes him far more interesting than an omnipotent abstraction.

Athena is Hamilton's clear favorite among the female Olympians. As the goddess of wisdom, craft, and civilization, Athena represents for Hamilton exactly what the Greeks valued most: reason allied with practical intelligence. Her sponsorship of Odysseus (the cleverest of the Greek heroes) rather than Achilles (the strongest) is read as a Greek statement of values.

Apollo receives an extended treatment. Hamilton sees Apollo as the quintessential Greek ideal: the god of light, reason, music, and prophecy who stands for the ordered, rational, beautiful aspect of existence. His tension with Dionysus, the god of ecstasy and dissolution, represents the fundamental Greek tension between rational order and creative chaos that Friedrich Nietzsche would later analyze in The Birth of Tragedy.

Dionysus is treated with appropriate ambivalence. Hamilton acknowledges both his capacity for joy and creative intoxication and his dangerous, destructive dimension. The myth of the Maenads (the women driven to ecstatic frenzy by Dionysus, tearing apart whatever crosses their path) is not glossed over. This is one of the places where Hamilton proves herself willing to confront the darker dimensions of the tradition.

Hermes is presented with particular affection. As the messenger of the gods, the guide of souls to the underworld, the patron of travelers, thieves, and merchants, and the inventor of the lyre, Hermes is the most mobile and most playful of the Olympians. His quicksilver quality makes him difficult to capture in a definitive portrait, and Hamilton's brief but sharp characterization captures this quality effectively.

The Great Heroes: Perseus, Theseus, and Hercules

The three extended hero myths in Part Three are among the best told sections of the book, and they illuminate several aspects of Greek heroism that modern readers often miss.

Perseus is the myth of the hero who must face what cannot be directly seen. The Gorgon Medusa turns anyone who meets her gaze to stone; Perseus survives by looking only at her reflection in his polished shield. This oblique approach to danger is not cowardice but wisdom. Hamilton notes that the myth encodes a principle: some truths can only be approached indirectly. The philosopher cannot look directly at the Form of the Good; the shaman cannot look directly at the spirit of illness; the hero cannot look directly at the face of death. Each requires a mediating mirror.

Theseus is the hero of Athens, and his myth is distinctly political in ways that the myths of other heroes are not. The Minotaur in the labyrinth represents the tribute that Athens paid to Crete (seven youths and seven maidens each year). Theseus volunteers to be among the tribute, enters the labyrinth, kills the Minotaur, and liberates Athens from this obligation. Hamilton reads this as the myth of Athenian self-determination: the moment when a city chooses to resist imperial domination rather than accommodate it.

Hercules (Heracles in Greek) is the most complex of the three. Hamilton does not idealize him. She presents the twelve labors fully, but she also presents the murderous rages in which Hercules kills his own children, his episodes of madness, and his death by the poisoned shirt sent by his wife Deianeira out of jealous love. The contrast between Hercules' enormous strength and his constant vulnerability to passion and madness gives the myth its psychological richness. Hamilton reads Hercules as the myth of human strength corrupted by anger and redeemed by heroic service.

The Argonauts' quest for the Golden Fleece receives extended treatment in this section. Hamilton draws on Apollonius of Rhodes' Argonautica for the narrative, though she also incorporates earlier material. The figure of Medea, one of the most terrifying characters in all of classical mythology, is presented with appropriate complexity: a woman whose supernatural gifts and passionate nature lead to acts that Hamilton refuses to excuse or sentimentalize.

The Trojan War Cycle

The Trojan War section is perhaps the most important in the book for Western literary culture, because so much of subsequent Western literature - from Virgil's Aeneid to Dante's Inferno to Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida to James Joyce's Ulysses - presupposes familiarity with these myths.

Hamilton begins before the war, with the Judgment of Paris (the contest between Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite for the golden apple), then moves through Helen's abduction, the assembly of the Greek fleet at Aulis, and into the major episodes of the Iliad: the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, the aristeia (battle excellence) of Hector, the death of Patroclus, and Achilles' terrible grief and revenge.

She gives the Odyssey extended treatment, covering Odysseus's encounters with the Cyclops, the sirens, Circe, the Phaeacians, and the suitors at home. This section is the one most familiar to most readers and Hamilton's retelling is one of the clearest and most complete available in a single-volume survey.

The aftermath of the war is equally important: Agamemnon's murder by Clytemnestra, the returns (or failed returns) of the other Greek heroes, and the founding myth of Rome through Aeneas (covered briefly, with the note that Virgil's Aeneid should be read for the full account).

The Myths of the Greek Tragedians

Some of Hamilton's most sympathetic writing appears in the sections covering the myths as told by the great Athenian tragedians. She was deeply familiar with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in Greek, and her portraits of the major tragic characters convey both the literary quality of the originals and their psychological depth.

The Oresteia cycle (Agamemnon, the Libation Bearers, and the Eumenides) is presented as what it is: a trilogy that moves from private murder through blood vengeance to the founding of justice as a social institution. The Furies who pursue Orestes for killing his mother represent the older, pre-Hellenic morality of blood obligation; Athena's establishment of a court of law represents the newer Greek morality of civic reason. The myth encodes the transition from tribal to civic society.

The Oedipus cycle (Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone) receives the most extended treatment among the tragic myths. Hamilton is careful to resist the Freudian reading that had already become dominant by her time: Oedipus is not a man who wanted to kill his father and marry his mother. He is a man of extraordinary intelligence and goodwill who is destroyed by knowledge arriving too late. The tragedy is epistemological, not psychosexual. Hamilton's reading holds up better than Freud's.

The Norse Mythology Section

The final section of the book, covering Norse mythology, is shorter than the Greek sections but serves an important comparative function. Hamilton is explicit about why she includes it: to show how differently mythology develops when the underlying cultural spirit differs.

The Greek gods are beautiful, witty, and ultimately secure in their Olympian existence. The Norse gods know they are doomed. Odin hangs on Yggdrasil for nine days to gain the knowledge of the runes. Thor battles the Midgard Serpent. Loki engineers the death of Baldr. All of these actions take place against the background of the inevitable Ragnarok, the final battle in which the gods themselves will fall.

Hamilton reads this as the product of a culture forged in harsh climate and constant danger, one that needed a mythology of courage in the face of certain defeat rather than a mythology of divine beauty and human perfectibility. The Norse spirit says: even if the gods themselves must die, they will fight with everything they have until the end. This is the spirit of the Viking warrior who faces odds he knows are fatal without flinching.

The contrast illuminates something important about what mythology does: it encodes the deepest values of the culture that produces it, gives those values divine sanction, and teaches through story what cannot be taught through instruction. Different cultural circumstances produce different mythological visions, and those visions in turn shape the behavior and self-understanding of the people who inherit them.

Spiritual Dimensions of Greek Mythology

Hamilton's Mythology is primarily a literary and cultural survey rather than an esoteric one. But for readers who come to mythology seeking spiritual wisdom, the Greek myths encode several layers of meaning that Hamilton's narrative preserves even when she does not comment on them directly.

The Eleusinian Mysteries, the most important religious institution of classical Greece, centered on the myth of Persephone's abduction and return. This myth encodes an initiatory understanding of consciousness: the soul (Persephone) must descend into the realm of death (the underworld of Hades) before it can fully inhabit life again. The Mysteries were initiation rituals in which participants underwent a symbolic death and rebirth experience that Plato and other initiates described as permanently transforming. The myth is the public face of a secret teaching about the nature of consciousness.

The myth of Prometheus is equally rich spiritually. Prometheus steals fire from the gods and gives it to humanity. For the Olympians, this is transgression. For humanity, it is gift. The fire represents consciousness, reason, the divine spark that distinguishes humans from animals. Prometheus is punished eternally for making this gift. The myth asks: what is the price of consciousness? What does it cost to know? And who is the appropriate custodian of divine fire - the gods, who hoard it, or the humans, who need it?

Plato drew on myth throughout his philosophy, and the Neoplatonists read Greek mythology as encoded cosmological teaching. In their reading, the myths of the gods' genealogies describe the emanation of being from the One; the heroes' quests describe the soul's descent into matter and its possible return; and the great catastrophes (the Flood, the fall of Troy, the destruction of the Titans) describe the periodic dissolution and renewal of cosmic order. Hamilton doesn't develop these readings, but they are available to any reader who comes to the myths with this context.

Hamilton vs. Other Mythology Books

Hamilton's Mythology is the most widely used but not the only excellent survey of classical mythology. Understanding how it compares to alternatives helps readers choose the right book for their purpose.

Robert Graves' Greek Myths (1955, two volumes) is the most comprehensive scholarly treatment in English. Graves provides multiple variants of each myth, extensive footnotes tracing each element to specific sources, and his own (controversial) theory that the myths encode memories of a pre-Hellenic matriarchal civilization. His work is more demanding than Hamilton's but rewards careful reading with far more detail. Hamilton for accessibility; Graves for depth.

Ovid's Metamorphoses is the primary source for most of the love stories Hamilton covers in Part Two. Reading Ovid in translation (Ted Hughes' Tales from Ovid is excellent) reveals the literary quality that Hamilton's prose cannot fully convey. Hamilton's retelling is accurate but Ovid is a great poet; something is inevitably lost in the translation to summary.

Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth and The Hero with a Thousand Faces approach mythology from a comparative psychological perspective rather than a classical literary one. Campbell illuminates the universal patterns underlying all mythology; Hamilton provides the specific classical material. They are complementary: Hamilton gives you the what of Greek mythology; Campbell gives you a framework for understanding why it matters across cultures and time.

Thomas Bulfinch's Mythology (1855) preceded Hamilton and was the standard survey for nearly a century. Hamilton's book largely superseded it because Hamilton is more attentive to her sources, less inclined to sanitize, and a better writer. Bulfinch remains valuable as a Victorian perspective on classical mythology but is dated in ways that Hamilton's work largely is not.

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