As a kid, I loved Greek Myths. And I read Homer when I was around 10 years old (and have reread Homer over the decades). So John Spurling’s ARCADIAN DAYS: GODS, WOMEN, AND MEN FROM GREEK MYTHS was a must-read book for me.
John Spurling is a gifted writer and captures the unique world of Greek Gods and Goddesses who influence humans. Spurling’s choice of five myths starts with Prometheus and Pandora, and continues with Jason and the sorceress Medea, Oedipus and his daughter Antigone, Achilles and his mother Thetis, and Odysseus and Penelope.
My favorite myth in ARCADIAN DAYS is Jason and his Argonauts who seek the Golden Fleece and find the assistance of Medea the sorceress brings unanticipated consequences. If you enjoy classic stories with astounding plots and colossal events, you’ll love ARCADIAN DAYS: GODS, WOMEN, AND MEN FROM GREEK MYTHS. Highly recommended! Do you have a favorite Greek Myth? GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Notes — xi
Introduction — 1
PROMETHEUS AND PANDORA
- Fat and Fire — 3
- Wife and Gift — 11
- Eagle and Chains — 19
- Rain and Waves — 22
JASON AND MEDEA
- The Man With One Sandal — 28
- The Departure — 34
- Lemnos, Hellespont, Arkton — 37
- The Sea of Marmora — 42
- The Black Sea — 49
- Colchis — 54
- The Return — 68
- Corinth — 75
OEDIPUS AND ANTIGONE
- Dragon’s Teeth — 81
- Investigation — 86
- Accusation — 91
- Murder — 95
- First Shepherd — 97
- Second Shepard — 100
- Punishment — 103
- Colonos — 105
- Seven Against Seven — 112
- Burial — 116
- Sophocles or Euripides?
ACHILLES AND THETIS
- The Parents — 128
- The Beloved Son — 131
- The Siege of Troy — 136
- Death and Vengeance — 154
- A Surprise Visit — 173
- Last Days — 178
ODYSSEUS AND PENELOPE
- Ithaka — 187
- Troy — 198
- Africa — 208
- Cyclops — 210
- Alolia — 218
- Laistrygones — 220
- Circe — 221
- Hades — 232
- Sirens, Scylla, Charybdis — 238
- Thrinakia — 240
- Calypso — 245
- Phaeacians — 253
- Return — 267
- Seconding — 286
Glossary of Names — 305
I love the myth of Pandora because even after she opened the box and set free all of the evils to haunt the world, there was one thing left in the box…HOPE.
Deb, and I learned from John Spurling’s version of Pandora that she was a cyborg!
Not a favorite myth but a favourite novel based on myth, HERCULES, MY SHIPMATE, Robert Graves’ magnificent work that grounds Jason, Hercules, and the other Argonauts in a recreation of Bronze Age history.
Fred, I’ve had HERCULES, MY SHIPMATE on my shelf for decades! I need to finally read it…soon! In Spurling’s version Hercules isn’t always a Nice Guy.
No one favorite, but I can still remember when my mother went back to college when I was about 12 and took Greek mythology. She read Edith Hamilton’s MYTHOLOGY and I read it along with her and helped her with her studying.
As the British would say, Zeus really put it around, didn’t he?
Jeff, I had a paperback copy of Edith Hamilton’s MYTHOLOGY that I read as a kid. Loved it! John Spurling’s versions in ARCADIAN DAYS are more “adult.” Zeus was powerful, but ARCADIAN DAYS shows times when Zeus fears other gods. He was always wary of Prometheus because he could see the Future.
Medea is hair-raising but really exciting seen live.
Patti, I’ve enjoyed all the Greek Myth plays I’ve seen. I agree with you on MEDEA. Like Circe, Medea was a sorceress of immense power!
My memory (such as it is) is prompting the forebrain to note that THE PLAY OF THE WEEK, the almost universally loved series from then then-folding NTA Film Network of television stations, began its two-year run with a staging of MEDEA. (And TPOTW reran on NET/National Educational Television stations rather widely after NTA shut down all network operations, alongside such new productions in that other doomed but less so network as NET PLAYHOUSE, leading no few sloppy would-be historians to refer to THE PLAY OF THE WEEK as a PBS program, wrong on two counts.)
As a young reader, already seeking out horror and every kind of fiction that related to horror, I fell-to on all sorts of mythology and folklore collections as I could find (and while I never gave Hamilton much of a go, did read a Whole Lot of the Greco-Roman classical pantheon, and enjoyed from youth the better translations of Sophocles and his peers…along with no lack of native American mythology, African (including North African/Arab) myth and folklore, and a modicum of similar work from various Asian cultures, the latter two driven in part by early enjoyment of Kipling (as of two minds he could always be) and Harold Courlander’s work. I did give WHD Rouse’s prose translation of THE ODYSSEY more effort than it deserved (Andrew Hurley’s spiritual forefather), and happily landed on Samuel Butler’s ILIAD instead.
So, no single favorite myth springs to mind…but a love for the pantheons which help to explain the arbitrary cruelties of life by casting the humanoid gods as as childish and egomaniacal as their human creations/descendants can be (and that includes At Least the Old Testament Yahweh). As my early-childhood animism was quickly replaced by atheism (of a less rigid sort than some spokespeople profess), my appreciation for myth (and lack of appreciation for some of the boxes the likes of Joseph Campbell wished to restrict them to) continued and perhaps grew. One of the key reading experiences of my youth, definitely along the Courlander volumes, was Susan Feldman’s anthology/partial retelling when not simply anthologizing work THE STORYTELLING STONE, in which the shortest of the included creation myths was from one of the SW eventual-US nations, wherein creators Coyote and Raven or some similar sort of intelligent bird were arguing about the nature of the human creatures they were devising. The bird god insisted that humans would have hands similar to its feet, with articulated and free-to-move digits; frustrated, Coyote, who had wanted humanity to have a relatively restricted paw like it had, conceded, but added a demand: “Very well, But then they will have to die.”
Todd, my path to loving Greek Myths parallels yours. And, I also enjoy myths from other cultures, too!