All jokes aside: the fact that Graves is nigh-ubiquitously dismissed in modern-day classics as a pseudoscientific conspiracy theorist with some incredibly weird ideas about women and about the formation of mythology in general (as well as someone who appeared to genuinely believe he had communicated with the Roman emperor Claudius) is a goddamn relief, given the unfortunate prevalence of conspiracy theory-esque nonsense masquerading as genuine scholarship. Each myth is explained in clear English and divided into paragraphs relating to each of the ancient Greek works which mention the myths. Fagles uses a loose five-beat line and I find this translation both clear and sensitive to the magic of literary techniques such as alliteration. These ancient references are then listed which easily provides the reader the information they need to do further investigation.

This volume is translated by John Dryden, introduced by Peter Levi, and illustrated by Francis Cleyn. Such details have their place - in the footnotes where the interested reader can find them if they wish. Sometimes names were changed (as when Aphrodite became Venus or Odysseus Ulysses); sometimes they were actually spelled differently (as when Asclepius became Aesculapius); sometimes no changes at all were made, so that stories with a particular Green location (such as the spring of Hippocrene near Thebes, created when the winged horse Pegasus stamped his hoof on a rock) were accepted quite happily by people who had never otherwise heard of, or seen, the originals. Although many of the names are very difficult to pronounce, it is still a very enjoyable read if you are interested in Greek Mythology. It's precisely as "scholarly" studies that they disappointed me; and yes, they certainly also fail as "story-telling".Robert Graves is quite thorough in writing about the myths and at the end of each story, he provides foot notes that can be as long as the story itself.

They think that the copy I picked up in the Reading Room is the current published version and the larger dimensions advertised on the web site are incorrect and refer to a previous edition. Everything I’ve read by Robert Graves has been either homophobic or misogynistic (despite his own dubious sexuality), so understandably that makes me a bit leery about him. The Legends of King Arthur was released in 2000, introduced by Richard Barber and featuring a number of different translations of the Arthurian legends. If you already know the Greek Myths, and know what you want to refresh your memory about, this is the right book for you. Although Graves makes use of folkloric, ethnographic, historic and archaeological sources in interpreting the myths they all appear to have already been out of date in the 1950's (when he wrote this book) and, worse, the sources themselves are not referenced.From Chretien de Troyes to Malory, the romances tell of Perceval, Gawain, Lancelot and Galahad in their quests for ‘Sangraal’. Even at the time, Murray's work was widely criticised by other academics and little has changed in that regard since - if anything the academy has become more entrenched in its criticisms of her. There were rooms leading to rooms leading to rooms, dark and musty rooms filled with the wonderful smell of old books. While other collections depict the stories in isolation, Green creates drama and tension by presenting his myths as a sequence of events, so that the Heroic Age is relived as a complete historical era.