Brief Notes on Edith Hamilton's Mythology (1942)

A fine book, from which I derived much pleasure in the reading and looked forward to each daily section. It seems to be considered as an introductory book on the subject for high school students, something I ought to be beyond by this point of my life. However, while most of the figures and stories are familiar to me, I have still failed to commit some of the more important ones to memory, nor have I ever organized the material in my head as neatly as it is done here. I certainly don't think that I would have gotten very much out of this book as a teenager, without any meaningful prior exposure to classical literature. I also appreciated the simple presentations at the beginning of each section regarding the literary sources from which the myths have come down to us. I am weak on Euripides and have never read Ovid, who were major sources, and I was unfamiliar with Appollodorus as well, whom Edith Hamilton disparaged as a dull and inferior writer, though on numerous occasions she opted to base her account of a story on his versions rather than Ovid's, on the basis of their probably being more truthful to the way it was traditionally told.

The book is written in what I kind of think of as the 'conversational learned style' which lasted from the 20s really up to the early 50s. It is a style to which I have always been partial. The tone is not confrontational nor hyperbolic in promoting the breakthrough in human understanding that the author's researches and insights represent, and humorous observations are dropped in (gently) from time to time at some particularly ludicrous or otherwise illogical aspect of a myth. It organizes and conveys information of a high general interest in a concise, understandable way such as it is not usually presented, and that is also pleasant. Our author assumes a mainly northern European-descended audience for her work: in a brief section at the end on the Norse myths, she writes, as a reason for including these in her survey: "By race we are connected with the Norse; our culture goes back to the Greeks." This sense of the homogeneity of the audience probably accounts somewhat for the intimate tone of the book. In the very short forward when she referred to Shakespeare I thought I detected some affectation or self-puffery with regard to her understanding of the greatness of this author and the serious level she occupied in that game; but perhaps I am overly sensitive to any emphasis people make concerning any superiority they possess. I did not find anything off-putting in her writing about the ancients.

  
Looking at some of the online reviews, someone wrote that they had taken a mythology class in college and the first thing the professor said was "I hope you all haven't been reading junk like Edith Hamilton". This sort of thing is always very obnoxious because it is unnecessary, even in the unlikely event that someone teaching an undergraduate mythology course is really that far advanced compared to Edith Hamilton both in his understanding and his pedagogy. If the students really learn what you are teaching them, they will presumably come to a similar understanding to that of the teacher, and if they are too stupid to do this, mocking such learning as they do have probably is no help to them. I know there is the problem that ignorant people who have read Edith Hamilton in high school think they know something and that they need to be knocked down a peg and the professor needs to establish that when you are in his class you are playing with the big boys and are dealing with a level of intellectual firepower that, especially if you are from a middle class background, you have probably never encountered before, but I don't think it is helpful in most instances to the students. I also believe that any professor doing this nowadays is probably a complete poser. When I was a student you still had some old Europeans to deal with who may well have spoken five languages by the age of thirteen and heard no other music than what was of the highest quality before they were thirty, but any baby boomer, let alone someone of my generation, who grew up in this country and tries to act like they were born with a deeper understanding of literature and mythology than Edith Hamilton attained in the whole of her earnest life is almost certainly full of it.