Why we read myths through marble

Stories that were seen before they were read

Most people meet Greek mythology through objects before they meet it through texts: a white goddess in a museum, a plaster cast in a school corridor, a broken frieze on a postcard. Those objects are not illustrations added to the stories later. For many ancient viewers, a statue in a sanctuary or a relief on a temple was the story, seen every day on the way to the market or to worship.

We wanted a place where the two could be read together, calmly and without hurry. Each story here begins with what the ancient authors actually wrote, then asks how the tale looked when it was cut in stone, cast in bronze or painted on a wall, and what the image adds or leaves out.

How we read the sources

We go back to the ancient texts for every claim: Homer and Hesiod, the tragedians, Ovid, Apollodorus, Pausanias and the rest. When a story survives only in a late summary or in fragments, we say so. When two authors tell it differently, we set the versions side by side rather than quietly choosing the more convenient one.

Quotations are our own renderings from the Greek and Latin, kept close to the sense of the original and marked as ours. We give book and line numbers only where we are confident of them, so that you can find the passage yourself.

What the marble changes

Reading through sculpture shapes the stories in particular ways. It draws us to moments that can be held still: Pandora on the workbench, Echo turned to stone, Hercules leaning on his club. It makes us notice who was carved often and who almost never, and why some myths lived mainly in voices rather than in stone.

It also keeps us honest about loss. Many famous statues are Roman copies of Greek bronzes that have vanished, and many reliefs are known only from a traveller’s description. We try to say which is which, because knowing what has survived is part of understanding the myth.

About our images

The images on this site are illustrations created for it, in the manner of fine-art photographs of marble sculpture. They are not photographs of real museum pieces, and they should not be taken as evidence for how any ancient object looks. Whenever we discuss a real statue, relief or vase, we name the object and the museum that holds it, so that you can go and see it for yourself.