Bulfinch's Mythology (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

By Thomas Bulfinch and Charles Martin

Bulfinchs Mythology, by Thomas Bulfinch, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

• New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
• Footnotes and endnotes
• Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
• Comments by other famous authors
• Study questions to challenge the readers viewpoints and expectations
• Bibliographies for further reading
• Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each readers understanding of these enduring works.   One of the leading popularizers of classical learning in the nineteenth century, Thomas Bulfinch made the myths and legends of the ancient and medieval world available to American audiences through his three decisive works, The Age of Fable, The Age of Chivalry, and Legends of Charlemagne, collectively published and widely known as Bulfinch’s Mythology.    A banking clerk by day, Bulfinch spent his nights skillfully weaving often disparate versions of classical and medieval mythology into a coherent whole. The thoroughness with which he combed through his sources made his mythological books standard reference guides for many years, while the vigor of his storytelling enthralled generations of readers. Written to “teach mythology not as a study but as a relaxation from study,” these timeless volumes span the ages: The Age Of Fable describes the gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome, as well as the mythology of the Germanic tribes, England, and the Near East; The Age of Chivalry tells the story of King Arthur and his court, Lancelot and Guinevere, and the death of Arthur; and Legends of Charlemagne gives a thrilling account of the reign of the first great French emperor, his wars, and his conquests.   Charles Martin is a poet and translator. His verse translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses was published in 2003 by W. W. Norton and received the Harold Morton Landon Award from the Academy of American Poets for 2004. His most recent book of poems, Starting from Sleep: New and Selected Poems, published in 2002 by the Sewanee Writers’ Series/The Overlook Press, was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award of the Academy of American Poets.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics
• Release date: Jun 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411431874

Book preview

Table of Contents

From the Pages of Bulfinch’s Mythology

Title Page

Copyright Page

Thomas Bulfinch

The World of Thomas Bulfinch and Bulfinch’s Mythology

Introduction

THE AGE OF FABLEORSTORIES OF GODS AND HEROES

PREFACE

CHAPTER I - INTRODUCTION

ROMAN DIVINITIES

CHAPTER II - PROMETHEUS AND PANDORA

CHAPTER III - APOLLO AND DAPHNE-PYRAMUS AND THISBE-CEPHALUS AND PROCRIS

APOLLO AND DAPHNE

PYRAMUS AND THISBE

CEPHALUS AND PROCRIS

CHAPTER IV - JUNO AND HER RIVALS, 10 AND CALLISTO-DIANA AND ACTÆON-LATONA AND ...

CALLISTO

DIANA AND ACTÆON

LATONA AND THE RUSTICS

CHAPTER V - PHAETON

CHAPTER VI - MIDAS-BAUCIS AND PHILEMON

BAUCIS AND PHILEMON

CHAPTER VII - PROSERPINE-GLAUCUS AND SCYLLA

GLAUCUS AND SCYLLA

CHAPTER VIII - PYGMALION-DRYOPE-VENUS AND ADONIS—APOLLO AND HYACINTHUS

DRYOPE

VENUS AND ADONIS

APOLLO AND HYACINTHUS

CHAPTER IX - CEYX AND HALCYONE: OR, THE HALCYON BIRDS

CHAPTER X - VERTUMNUS AND POMONA

CHAPTER XI - CUPID AND PSYCHE

CHAPTER XII - CADMUS-THE MYRMIDONS

THE MYRMIDONS

CHAPTER XIII - NISUS AND SCYLLA—ECHO AND NARCISSUS-CLYTIE-HERO AND LEANDER

NISUS AND SCYLLA

ECHO AND NARCISSUS

CLYTIE

HERO AND LEANDER

CHAPTER XIV - MINERVA-NIOBE

MINERVA

NIOBE

CHAPTER XV - THE GRÆÆ AND GORGONS—PERSEUS AND MEDUSA-ATLAS-ANDROMEDA

THE GRÆÆ AND GORGONS

PERSEUS AND MEDUSA

PERSEUS AND ATLAS

THE SEAS MONSTER

THE WEDDING FEAST

CHAPTER XVI - MONSTERS

GIANTS, SPHINX, PEGASUS AND CHIMÆRA-CENTAURS-PYGMIES-GRIFFIN

THE SPHINX

PEGASUS AND THE CHIMERA

THE CENTAURS

THE PYGMIES

THE GRIFFIN, OR GRYPHON

CHAPTER XVII - THE GOLDEN FLEECE-MEDEA AND ÆSON

THE GOLDEN FLEECE

MEDEA AND ÆSON

CHAPTER XVIII - MELEAGER AND ATALANTA

ATALANTA

CHAPTER XIX - HERCULES-HEBE AND GANYMEDE

HERCULES

HEBE AND GANYMEDE

CHAPTER XX - THESEUS-DÆDALUS-CASTOR AND POLLUX

THESEUS

OLYMPIC AND OTHER GAMES

DÆDALUS

CASTOR AND POLLUX

CHAPTER XXI - BACCHUS-ARIADNE

BACCHUS

ARIADNE

CHAPTER XXII - THE RURAL DEITIES—ERISICHTHON-RHCECUS-THE WATER DEITIES—THE ...

THE RURAL DEITIES

ERISICHTHON

RHŒCUS

THE WATER DEITIES

THE CAMENÆ

THE WINDS

CHAPTER XXIII - ACHELOUS AND HERCULES-ADMETUS AND ALCESTIS-ANTIGONE-PENELOPE

ACHELOUS AND HERCULES

ADMETUS AND ALCESTIS

ANTIGONE

PENELOPE

CHAPTER XXIV - ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE-ARISTÆUS-AMPHION-LINUS- ...

ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE

ARISTÆUS, THE BEE-KEEPER

AMPHION

LINUS

THAMYRIS

MARSYAS

MELAMPUS

MUSÆUS

CHAPTER XXV - ARION—IBYCUS—SIMONIDES-SAPPHO

ARION

IBYCUS

SIMONIDES

SAPPHO

CHAPTER XXVI - ENDYMION-ORION-AURORA AND TITHONUS-ACIS AND GALATEA

ORION

AURORA AND TITHONUS

ACIS AND GALATEA

CHAPTER XXVII - THE TROJAN WAR

THE ILIAD

CHAPTER XXVIII - THE FALL OF TROY—RETURN OF THE GREEKS—AGAMEMNON, ORESTES AND ELECTRA

THE FALL OF TROY

MENELAUS AND HELEN

AGAMEMNON, ORESTES AND ELECTRA

TROY

CHAPTER XXIX - ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES-THE ...

RETURN OF ULYSSES

THE LÆSTRYGONIANS

SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

CALYPSO

CHAPTER XXX - THE PFLEACIANS—FATE OF THE SUITORS

THE PHÆACIANS

FATE OF THE SUITORS

CHAPTER XXXI - ADVENTURES OF ÆNEAS-THE HARPIES—DIDO—PALINURUS

ADVENTURES OF ÆNEAS

DIDO

PALINURUS

CHAPTER XXXII - THE INFERNAL REGIONS—THE SIBYL

THE INFERNAL REGIONS

ELYSIUM

THE SIBYL

CHAPTER XXXIII - ÆNEAS IN ITALY CAMILLA-EVANDER-NISUS AND EURYALUS-MEZENTIUS-TURNUS

OPENING THE GATES OF JANUS

CAMILLA

EVANDER

INFANT ROME

NISUS AND EURYALUS

MEZENTIUS

PALLAS, CAMILLA, TURNUS

CHAPTER XXXIV - PYTHAGORAS—EGYPTIAN DEITIES—ORACLES

PYTHAGORAS

SYBARIS AND CROTONA

EGYPTIAN DEITIES

MYTH OF OSIRIS AND ISIS

ORACLES

ORACLE OF TROPHONIUS

ORACLE OF ÆSCULAPIUS

ORACLE OF APIS

CHAPTER XXXV - ORIGIN OF MYTHOLOGY—STATUES OF GODS AND GODDESSES—POETS OF MYTHOLOGY

ORIGIN OF MYTHOLOGY

STATUES OF THE GODS

THE OLYMPIAN JUPITER

THE MINERVA OF THE PARTHENON

THE VENUS DE’ MEDICI

THE APOLLO BELVEDERE

THE DIANA A LA BICHE

POETS OF MYTHOLOGY

VIRGIL

"ON MILTON

OVID,

CHAPTER XXXVI - MODERN MONSTERS—THE PHOENIX—BASILISK—UNICORN-SALAMANDER

MODERN MONSTERS

THE PHOENIX

THE COCKATRICE, OR BASILISK

THE UNICORN

THE SALAMANDER

CHAPTER XXXVII - EASTERN MYTHOLOGY-ZOROASTER—HINDU ...

ZOROASTER

HINDU MYTHOLOGY

VISHNU

SIVA

JUGGERNAUT

CASTES

BUDDHA

THE GRAND LAMA

FRESTERJOHN

CHAPTER XXXVIII - NORTHERN MYTHOLOGY-VALHALLA—THE VALKYRIOR

NORTHERN MYTHOLOGY

OF THE JOYS OF VALHALLA

THE VALKYRIOR

OF THOR AND THE OTHER GODS

OF LOKI AND HIS PROGENY

HOW THOR PAID THE MOUNTAIN GIANT HIS WAGES

THE RECOVERY OF THE HAMMER

CHAPTER XXXIX - THOR’S VISIT TO JOTUNHEIM

THORS VISIT TO JOTUNHEIM, . THE GIANTS’ COUNTRY

CHAPTER XL - THE DEATH OF BALDUR—THE ELVES—RUNIC LETTERS—SKALDS-ICELAND

THE DEATH OF BALDUR

THE FUNERAL OF BALDUR

THE ELVES

RAGNAROK, THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS

RUNIC LETTERS

THE SKALDS

ICELAND

CHAPTER XLI - THE DRUIDS—IONA

DRUIDS

IONA

CHAPTER XLII - BEOWULF

PROVERBIAL EXPRESSIONS

THE AGE OF CHIVALRYORLEGENDS OF KING ARTHUR

PREFACE

PART I - KING ARTHUR AND HIS KNIGHTS

CHAPTER I - INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER II - THE MYTHICAL HISTORY OF ENGLAND

CHAPTER III - ARTHUR

CHAPTER IV - CARADOC BRIEFBRAS; OR, CARADOC WITH THE SHRUNKEN ARM

CHAPTER V - SIR GAWAIN

CHAPTER VI - LAUNCELOT OF THE LAKE

CHAPTER VII - THE STORY OF LAUNCELOT—THE ADVENTURE OF THE CART

CHAPTER VIII - THE STORY OF LAUNCELOT—THE LADY OF SHALOTT

CHAPTER IX - THE STORY OF LAUNCELOT—QUEEN GUENEVER’S PERIL

CHAPTER X - THE STORY OF TRISTRAM OF LYONESSE

CHAPTER XI - TRISTRAM AND ISOUDE

CHAPTER XII - THE STORY OF SIR TRISTRAM OF LYONESSE

CHAPTER XIII - END OF THE STORY OF SIR TRISTRAM OF LYONESSE

CHAPTER XIV - THE STORY OF PERCEVAL

CHAPTER XV - THE QUEST OF THE SANGREAL

CHAPTER XVI - THE END OF THE QUEST

CHAPTER XVII - SIR AGRIVAIN’S TREASON

CHAPTER XVIII - MORTE D’ARTHUR

PART II - THE MABINOGEON

CHAPTER XIX - THE BRITONS

CHAPTER XX - THE LADY OF THE FOUNTAIN

CHAPTER XXI - THE LADY OF THE FOUNTAIN, CONTINUED

CHAPTER XXII - THE LADY OF THE FOUNTAIN, CONTINUED

CHAPTER XXIII - GERAINT, THE SON OF ERBIN

CHAPTER XXIV - GERAINT, THE SON OF ERBIN, CONTINUED

CHAPTER XXV - GERAINT, THE SON OF ERBIN, CONTINUED

CHAPTER XXVI - PWYLL, PRINCE OF DYVED

CHAPTER XXVII - BRANWEN, THE DAUGHTER OF LLYR

CHAPTER XXVIII - MANAWYDDAN

CHAPTER XXIX - KILWICH AND OLWEN

CHAPTER XXX - KILWICH AND OLWEN, CONTINUED

CHAPTER XXXI - PEREDUR, THE SON OF EVRAWC

CHAPTER XXXII - TALIESIN

PART III - THE KNIGHTS OF ENGLISH HISTORY

CHAPTER XXXIII - KING RICHARD AND THE THIRD CRUSADE

CHAPTER XXXIV - ROBIN HOOD OF SHERWOOD FOREST

CHAPTER XXXV - ROBIN HOOD AND HIS ADVENTURES

CHAPTER XXXVI - CHEVY CHASE

CHAPTER XXXVII - THE BATTLE OF OTTERBOURNE

CHAPTER XXXVIII - EDWARD THE BLACK PRINCE ICH DIEN

LEGENDS OF CHARLEMAGNE OR ROMANCE OF THE MIDDLE AGES

PREFACE

CHAPTER I - INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER II - THE PEERS, OR PALADINS

ORLANDO

ROLAND AND FERRAGUS

A ROLAND FOR AN OLIVER

RINALDO

CHAPTER III - THE TOURNAMENT

CHAPTER IV - THE SIEGE OF ALBRACCA

CHAPTER V - ADVENTURES OF RINALDO AND ORLANDO

CHAPTER VI - THE INVASION OF FRANCE

CHAPTER VII - THE INVASION OF FRANCE, CONTINUED

CHAPTER VIII - BRADAMANTE AND ROGERO

CHAPTER IX - ASTOLPHO AND THE ENCHANTRESS

CHAPTER X - THE ORC

CHAPTER XI - ASTOLPHO’S ADVENTURES CONTINUED, AND ISABELLA’S BEGUN

CHAPTER XII - MEDORO

CHAPTER XIII - ORLANDO MAD

CHAPTER XIV - ZERBINO AND ISABELLA

CHAPTER XV - ASTOLPHO IN ABYSSINIA

CHAPTER XVI - THE WAR IN AFRICA

CHAPTER XVII - ROGERO AND BRADAMANTE

CHAPTER XVIII - THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES

CHAPTER XIX - RINALDO AND BAYARD

CHAPTER XX - DEATH OF RINALDO

CHAPTER XXI - HUON OF BORDEAUX

CHAPTER XXII - HUON OF BORDEAUX, CONTINUED

CHAPTER XXIII - HUON OF BORDEAUX, CONTINUED

CHAPTER XXIV - OGIER, THE DANE

CHAPTER XXV - OGIER, THE DANE, CONTINUED

CHAPTER XXVI - OGIER, THE DANE, CONTINUED

Endnotes

For Further Reading

TIMELESS WORKS. NEW SCHOLARSHIP. EXTRAORDINARY VALUE.

From the Pages of Bulfinch’s Mythology

001

If no other knowledge deserves to be called useful but that which helps to enlarge our possessions or to raise our station in society, then mythology has no claim to the appellation. But if that which tends to make us happier and better can be called useful then we claim that epithet for our subject. For mythology is the handmaid of literature; and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.

(Preface, page 7)

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree,

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man,

Down to a sunless sea."

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

(Proserpine, pages 61-62)

Venus, playing one day with her boy Cupid, wounded her bosom with one of his arrows. She pushed him away, but the wound was deeper than she thought. Before it healed she beheld Adonis, and was captivated with him. She no longer took any interest in her favourite resorts—Paphos, and Cnidos, and Amathos, rich in metals. She absented herself from heaven, for Adonis was dearer to her than heaven.

(Venus and Adonis, page 69)

"What was that snakyheaded Gorgon-shield

What wise Minerva wore, unconquered virgin,

Wherewith she freezed her foes to congealed stone,

But rigid looks of chaste austerity,

And noble grace that dashed brute violence

With sudden adoration and blank awe!"

—John Milton

(Perseus and Medusa, page 114)

Æneas parted from Dido, though she tried every allurement and persuasion to detain him. The blow to her affection and her pride was too much for her to endure, and when she found that he was gone, she mounted a funeral pile which she had caused to be erected, and having stabbed herself was consumed with the pile. The flames rising over the city were seen by the departing Trojans, and, though the cause was unknown, gave to Æneas some intimation of the fatal event.

(Dido, page 245)

Ah, Launcelot! my knight, truly have I been told that thou art no longer worthy of me!

(The Story of Launcelot, page 412)

In the last decade of the twelfth century Richard I. of England took the cross, which had come to him as a sort of legacy from his father, and sailed for Antioch, which was being besieged by the Christians, to assist in the war in the Holy Land.

(King Richard and the Third Crusade, page 591 )

Charlemagne, or Charles the Great, succeeded his father, Pepin, on the throne in the year 768. This prince, though the hero of numerous romantic legends, appears greater in history than in fiction. Whether we regard him as a warrior or as a legislator, as a patron of learning or as the civilizer of a barbarous nation, he is entitled to our warmest admiration.

(Introduction to Legends of Charlemagne, page 669)

France was at this time the theatre of dreadful events. The Saracens and the Christians, in numerous encounters, slew one another.

(Medoro, page 748)

I receive thy homage, and pardon thee the death of my son, but only on one condition. You shall go immediately to the court of the Sultan Gaudisso; you shall present yourself before him as he sits at meat; you shall cut off the head of the most illustrious guest whom you shall find sitting nearest to him; you shall kiss three times on the mouth the fair princess his daughter, and you shall demand of the sultan, as token of tribute to me, a handful of the white hair of his beard, and four grinders from his mouth.

(Huon of Bordeaux, page 820)

002003

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The present text of Bulfinch’s Mythology comprises The Age of Fable, first published in

1855; The Age of Chivalry, first published in 1858; and Legends of Charlemagne, or

Romance of the Middle Ages, first published in 1863.

Published in 2006 by Barnes & Noble Classics with new Introduction, Notes,

Biography, Chronology, and For Further Reading.

Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading

Copyright @ 2006 by Charles Martin.

Note on Thomas Bulfinch and The World of Thomas Bulfinch and Bulfinch’s Mythology

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Bulfinch’s Mythology

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Thomas Bulfinch

005

Thomas Bulfinch was born in Newton, Massachusetts, on July 15, 1796, to Hannah Apthorp Bulfinch and noted architect Charles Bulfinch, both from wealthy and distinguished Boston families. Charles was financially destroyed by bad real estate investments, but Thomas received an excellent education; his years at Boston Latin School, Philips Exeter Academy, and Harvard gave him a foundation in the humanities and the classic Latin texts that he would later put to use in Bulfinch’s Mythology.

After graduating from Harvard in 1814, Bulfinch embarked on business ventures in hardware, textiles, and merchandising, with little success or pleasure. In 1837 he took a position as a clerk at the Merchant’s Bank of Boston and remained there the rest of his life. He spent his evenings reading and writing and in 1853 published his first book, Hebrew Lyrical History, a reorganization of the biblical Psalms into a historical narrative.

Two years later, nearing the age of sixty, Bulfinch published The Age of Fable, the first of the books that, along with The Age of Chivalry (1858) and The Legends of Charlemagne (1863), would come to be collected in Bulfinch’s Mythology. His Poetry of the Age of Fable (1863) and Shakespeare Adapted for Reading Classes and for the Family Circle (1865), though little known today, were also popular. He based another work, The Boy Inventor (1860), on the life of his protégé Matthew Edwards. Oregon and Eldorado, about the explorations of the Pacific Northwest, was published in 1866. Thomas Bulfinch died the next year and is buried in the family plot in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The World of Thomas Bulfinch and Bulfinch’s Mythology

006

Introduction

007

1

More than a hundred and fifty years ago, in 1855, three books that did much to shape the way Americans would come to view their emerging culture were published in the United States. Two of the three were written by poets concerned with creating American myths, and the third was written by a quiet, bookish man who labored to re-create the myths of classical Greece and Rome in a way that an American audience could understand. All three authors had great hopes of success, and sooner or later, those hopes were fulfilled: Their books have remained in print in one form or another since their first appearances, though their initial receptions were very different.

The most phenomenally successful of the three was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s book-length poem The Song of Hiawatha, which sold 10,000 copies in its first month in the stalls and 30,000 in its first year, making its author the most popular poet—and the wealthiest—in the English-speaking world. His book was an attempt to create an American epic out of Native American materials : Longfellow wove together stories gathered by folklorists about Hiawatha, the legendary culture hero of the Ojibways, and recast them in verse. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Longfellow’s creation was an inescapable part of the American cultural landscape, its monotonous trochaic lines recited and studied by generations of American schoolchildren, its situations dramatized, parodied, and translated into dozens of other languages. Though the book’s reputation, like its author’s, went into an apparently irreversible decline in the twentieth century, The Song of Hiawatha remains in print and is currently available in numerous editions.

Thomas Bulfinch’s The Age of Fable, according to its author’s own modest estimation, sold moderately well. Actually, it did rather better than that, selling, in its first year, about 6,000 copies. Its success—for, despite its author’s modesty, it was indeed a success-encouraged Bufinch to bring out its first sequel, The Age of Chivalry, three years later. What The Age of Fable did for classical mythology, its successor did for Arthurian legend; it gathered tales from diverse sources and told them in a way that would please an American audience. This book too was a success and was soon followed by Legends of Charlemagne.

By the time this last installment of the work we now call Bulfinch’s Mythology had made its appearance, Thomas Bulfinch had become something of a minor literary figure. The emphasis here should be on minor: In Boston, the city of his birth, Thomas Bulfinch was known only to a small group of family and friends; outside Boston, it is fair to say he was virtually unknown. Uncelebrated in his time and ours, he may nevertheless by now be the most successful of our three authors, since his book has been continuously in print in countless large editions since its first appearance.

Walt Whitman, the last of the three, expected that the American public would respond to his democratic affections with a similar enthusiasm for him. But despite its author’s heroic efforts at self-promotion, Leaves of Grass was the least successful of the three books. Whitman’s book, celebrating himself in lines that swept beyond the margins of their pages, defying rhyme, meter, and all contemporary literary conventions, would come to be seen in the twentieth century as one of the most important and original poems of the nineteenth. For its first edition, however, only 800 copies were printed, and it is anyone’s guess as to how many or how few of these were sold.

Despite their differences, Longfellow and Whitman were both poets attempting to create an American myth in verse. Both were conscious of the newness of the society in which they lived. Longfellow, born in 1807, grew up hearing from relatives the stories of the recent American revolution, some of which, like the stirring tale of Paul Revere’s midnight ride, he would later use as the subjects of his poems. Whitman, born in 1819, often spoke of how, as a boy in Brooklyn, he had waved a flag to greet the Marquis de Lafayette on his triumphant return visit to the republic he had helped to save, and how the returning hero lifted the future poet up on his knee and made much of him. Many of the stories that Whitman had heard of the revolution would later find their way into his poetry. But despite the two poets’ sense of belonging to a post-revolutionary generation with a strong responsibility for shaping a new American culture, they differed fundamentally in their attitudes toward its possibilities.

For Whitman, the new society could not realize itself unless it managed to create a new culture; the United States could no longer look back to Europe, could no longer depend on myths and legends that had grown out of, and not beyond, a past mired in outworn social distinctions and blind obedience to ignorance and religious superstition. For Whitman, the past was Europe, and the European past represented a form of corruption that the new society had to expunge completely. (Whitman, of course, made an exception for Lafayette, the nobleman who had abandoned his wife, child, and class in order to fight for American independence.) Only by sweeping away the past and starting anew could a new society be formed. The United States was to be a new Eden, and Walt Whitman saw himself (and was seen by many of his contemporaries) as its new Adam.

But to see the United States as a new Eden, and to sustain one’s belief in that conception, then as now, required an act of faith. Much in the young nation’s experience would have to be ignored or denied. This new Eden came already equipped with a history, which included the European settlers’ destruction of the indigenous peoples and their enslavement of Africans. It also included the religions of the Old World, many of them imported by the American colonists. And, of course, it included the arts and sciences as well, and those the colonists responded to and depended upon were created and nurtured in the Old World long before Europeans migrated to the new.

In times when the influence of the past seems overwhelming, a dead hand laid on the ambitions of the present, the prospect of get ting rid of the past altogether will have appeal to some. There are always others, however, who will find the idea horrifying or point less. Is it ever possible to create the new by destroying the past?

Nathaniel Hawthorne, decidedly skeptical about the possibility, instead believed that the new society needed to found itself on a knowledge of the best of European culture, ancient and modern. Far from being corrupted by such knowledge, the children of the New World could only be improved by it, and so in 1852 Hawthorne published A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys, in which he retold many of the myths and legends of the classical world, for the entertainment and edification of the young, arguing, No epoch of time can claim a copyright in these immortal fables.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had been Hawthorne’s classmate at Bowdoin College, and he shared his belief in the importance of European culture. Accordingly, the future man of letters prepared himself for his vocation by absorbing from the Old World the best it had to offer in the literature of past and present. Longfellow, while at Bowdoin, devoted himself to the study of classical literature, and he demonstrated his aptness for the literary life with a remarkable translation of one of the odes of the Roman poet Horace. As a result of this translation, Longfellow was offered a professorship in modern languages at Bowdoin and a trip to Europe, his first, in order to improve his command of French and undertake studies in German and Italian. On the eve of his trip, he wrote his father, My familiarity with the modern languages will unlock ... all those springs of literature, which formerly would have been as sealed books to me.

In his subsequent career as scholar and writer, Longfellow lived up to the obligations he felt to his readers, by interpreting the best of European literature for them, whether in lectures and essays, like those he gave at Harvard on Goethe and Schiller, which made those European giants known in the United States, or in his still well-regarded translation of The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri.

Especially in his own poetry, Longfellow was convinced of the need to use both conventional and innovative European forms to interpret American materials: He used the ballad form to write of Paul Revere’s ride through Massachusetts to warn the citizenry of the British invasion; he employed the hexameter line of Homer and Virgil in Evangeline, one of his most popular long poems, to tell the story of the exile of the French Acadians. And so, when he wrote The Song of Hiawatha, he went abroad in search of the meter he would use in his poem, and found it perfectly natural to use the meter of the Finnish epic, the Kalevala, to retell the Native American legends. That meter was itself a literary form, the invention of a Finnish folklorist, Elias Lonnrot, who gathered and collated the various versions of anonymous oral poets dealing with the myth of a Finnish culture hero.

We may be certain that the Eurocentric impulse was not confined to Cambridge or to the bookshops of Boston. A glance at the map of central New York reveals a remarkable number of cities, villages, and towns with names derived from the classical civilization of ancient Europe. Syracuse was named for Syracusa in Sicily (both noted for their salt production), and nearby is Ithaca, named after the island home of Odysseus. The classical poets Homer and Ovid both have towns named after them, as does the Roman triumvir, Pompey. Pompey’s contemporary, Marcus Tullius Cicero, is honored by a town that bears the affectionate nickname given him by successive generations of British and American readers, Tully. Rome is but a short distance from Troy, and nearby is the town of Fabius (named for a general who defended Rome against the invading army of Hannibal) as well as Camillus (a fourth-century Roman hero), Phoenix (the ever-rising bird), and Lysander (first to fall at Troy); the town of Marcellus preserves the memory of the Emperor Augustus’ early-dying nephew, briefly eulogized in book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid.

This enthusiasm for applying classical, especially Roman, names to new American communities was no doubt an early instance of American optimism as well as an attempt to acquire by appropriation a better destiny for these ramshackle towns and villages than the facts on the ground might suggest. But it was also a derivative of the revolutionary notion that saw the founders of the nation as the inheritors and practitioners of the virtues of Roman republicanism, the Brutuses and Catos of their day, pledging their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor against the tyranny of the time. There was a way in which Americans of that period saw the myths and legends of classical Greece and Rome as a part of the foundation myth of the United States.

Thomas Bulfinch was clearly sympathetic to those who, like Hawthorne and Longfellow, saw the New World as deriving from the old in its cultural models, though improving it in its social organization. The son of a man who had sought inspiration for an American architecture in Europe, a student himself of classical literature and an admirer of his younger contemporary, Longfellow (to whom he dedicated The Age of Fable), Bulfinch brought the classical myths to the citizens of the new republic. But while Whitman and Longfellow beam down on us from the choir of canonical American authors, the creator of Bulfinch’s Mythology remains something of a mystery: Who was this Bulfinch, that he should have a mythology of his own?

2

Thomas Bulfinch has never been the subject of a full-length biography, and virtually all that we know about his life derives from only two contemporary sources. One of these is a collection of letters and family papers made by his niece, Ellen Susan Bulfinch, which for the most part deal with the life and affairs of Thomas’ father, Charles, an architect and public servant and a figure of great prominence in the Boston of his day. The other source is a pamphlet entitled Voices of the Dead: A Sermon Preached at King’s Chapel, Boston, June 2, 1867, Being the Sunday Following the Decease of Mr. Thomas Bulfinch, by Andrew P. Peabody. Appended to the Reverend Peabody’s sermon is a brief autobiographical sketch ending in 1860, which Thomas Bulfinch wrote for a Harvard College reunion and which is supplemented with information supplied by Peabody.

Both of these biographical sources testify to the great affection that Bulfinch’s friends and family had for him; they also testify to the difficulties of writing about someone whose most prominent characteristic was the self-effacing modesty noted by all who came in contact with him. Selflessness of behavior combines with altruistic purpose in almost all of the glimpses that Bulfinch’s friends offer of him. There are times when he seems to be a character in one of the sentimental novels of the period. His friend and eulogist the Reverend Peabody wrote, So entirely had thought for the happiness of others become the pervading habit of his life, that on his death-bed one of his last inquiries was, who among his friends would be most gratified by the gift of some beautiful spring-flowers gathered by loving hands to be laid upon his pillow. Would such a person even have wanted a biography? Perhaps not.

Thomas Bulfinch’s self-effacement was, it appears, an inherited trait. His father, Charles Bulfinch, was similarly reticent about his personal feelings and likewise left behind few indications of what his private life was like. On the other hand, the senior Bulfinch’s public life as an architect and as a civil servant impacted directly and inescapably on the lives of his fellow Bostonians, from his time to the present day.

Charles Bulfinch was born in 1763, to one of Boston’s wealthiest families. He grew up in a house on Boston’s Bowdoin Square, and, after graduating from Harvard in 1781, spent several years traveling in England and France to complete his education. From childhood on, Charles was interested in architecture; if he wished to study the work of the best architects of his time and to study the ruins of the classical past that still influenced them, he would have to go to Europe. There he was able to gratify his interest by examining the kinds of buildings that he could not have found at home, for there were few buildings of any distinction then in any of the cities of colonial America. Guided by Thomas Jefferson, who was himself an amateur architect of some distinction, he made a grand tour of France and Italy.

When Charles Bulfinch returned from Europe in 1787, with trunks full of books and illustrations, and a sensibility enriched by all that he had taken in, he was more knowledgeable about European neoclassical architecture than any of his contemporaries at home. He was prepared to offer his services to those in Boston who needed them. Architecture in his day was not a profession: There were no schools but those of experience in which the subject might be learned, and there were no architectural firms as such. But by virtue of what he knew, and by virtue of his family’s position in Boston society, Charles Bulfinch was immediately recognized as fit to practice.

Most of Charles Bulfinch’s early work was in the nature of public buildings and monuments: In 1787 he designed a new State House for Boston; in 1789 he built the Beacon Monument and a triumphal arch for George Washington’s visit to the city. In those years he also built several churches in and around Boston as well as the State House at Hartford, Connecticut, the most important public building of its time. It would later be said of him that he had transformed Boston from a city made of wood to a city made of brick.

In 1787 Bulfinch solidified his social position by marrying his cousin, Hannah Apthorp, who came from a family as distinguished in Boston and as wealthy as his own was. She brought to the marriage not only a large fortune but a character whose serenity would survive the vicissitudes of her husband’s financial failures. Charles Bulfinch was in business, but he was not really a businessman. Described as retiring and timid and of a temperate, philosophic turn, he was a gentleman, and gentlemen did not work for a living: Not having to work for a living was, in fact, what distinguished a gentleman from everyone else.

As an amateur and a gentleman architect, Bulfinch offered his services for the public buildings he designed without expectation of payment. One of his projects, however, was a private development begun in 1793, a connected row of town houses in Boston. When his investors grew skittish, Bulfinch replaced their money with his own, and when the economy went into a depression in 1795, Bulfinch lost not only his fortune, but—since his wife’s money became his when they married—his wife’s fortune as well.

Overnight, the family fell from a very secure life of privilege to one of continual insecurity: There were no safety nets in colonial Boston, and there began for them a period of moving from one home to another, ever downsizing in an attempt to placate creditors. They left Boston (where the Bulfinch and Apthorp families had lived for generations) and went to Newton, Massachusetts, where, on July 15, 1796, Thomas Bulfinch was born.

Thomas Bulfinch’s childhood was a period of great uncertainty for his parents. His mother described their difficult situation in a letter that she wrote to Thomas when he was a young man: Your birth took place when heavy misfortunes oppressed the hearts of your parents, nor did we look upon even your existence with cheerfulness, yet it has been to us a blessing. Anecdotes of his childhood were remarkably few, but one, supplied by his niece Ellen, suggests that Bulfinch was not unaffected by the family situation: Another of the stories ... shows us the naughty Thomas resisting his mother’s entreaties, commands, and coercion, until his sister Susan has to come to the rescue, and the united strength of both is required to master the culprit. We can easily picture to ourselves the sturdy boy, rosy-cheeked and black-eyed, the very image of defiance. Yet, the niece goes on to say, this image meshes poorly with the image of the man the boy became : But to those who remember the dignified presence, the sweet urbanity, of the author of the ‘Age of Fable,’ it seems very amusing.

Thomas grew up in a household where economic instability and the social embarrassments that it produces were the rule. Another contemporary reports that Hannah Apthorp was unchanged by her loss of fortune, except that she no longer went out in society. That would seem to be a very considerable change indeed, suggesting that either she was no longer sure how she would be received by Boston’s elite, or she was too humiliated by her losses to appear before them. These days, much would be made of the psychological damage done to mother and son by the sudden and irreversible loss of their financial and social position, but for the Bulfinches, adversity seems only to have offered them a chance to display fortitude, as well as their faith in the promise of Christian redemption. This stoical response to the tribulations of the world was one that their society expected from them and met with approval.

Charles Bulfinch turned to public service in an attempt to support himself. Having been a member of the Board of Selectmen, the governing body of Boston, he was now appointed chairman of the board, as well as superintendent of police, a position that brought him for many years an annual salary of one thousand dollars. He performed his duties conscientiously and continued to practice as an architect, but the family fortunes were never repaired, and in 1811 he spent a month in prison for his debts. To judge from one of her later letters, Hannah Bulfinch found the shame of this situation almost unbearable; her husband, perhaps, had a greater appreciation of its ironies: Not only was he the superintendent of police and chairman of Boston’s Board of Selectmen at the time he was jailed, but he had also been the architect of the prison in which he was confined.

The effects of these social and financial tribulations on young Thomas Bulfinch can only be imagined, but they may have done much to influence the career choices that he later made. In the brief description of his life that he later wrote with his characteristic modesty, he gives only the faintest hint of the possible trauma, when he mentions that he was born at Newton, Mass., where his parents were temporarily residing, and then supplies the bare facts of his education at the Boston Latin School and Phillips Exeter Academy, which, as he said, fitted him for college. While at Harvard, he studied classical literature and like many students of his time, acquired sufficient proficiency at composition in Latin that he was able to write a mannered, though perfectly competent, ode in imitation of Horace, on the departure of a classmate for the postgraduate tour of Europe. He graduated from Harvard in 1814 and taught for a year at Boston Latin while, presumably, he sorted out his plans for the future.

None of Charles’ sons chose their father’s profession for their own. He seems to have discouraged them from doing so, telling one of them that all of the significant buildings in the new republic had already been put up, as proof that there would not be enough architectural work in the future to support a man. No doubt their father’s example, if not his rather otherworldly advice, would have made a great impression on the sons, but even if they had wished to take up his profession, they were no longer financially able to do so. There does not seem to have been enough money to send any of the sons of Charles Bulfinch on the usual grand tour of Europe.

The most likely way for a son to rebuild the family fortunes and find one of his own was to become what Charles had never been: a real businessman, rather than an amateur. The United States, enjoying a period of peace and prosperity after the War of 1812, offered great opportunities for ambitious young entrepreneurs. Indeed, the period from 1815 to 1820 is generally considered to have been the time when American manufacturing and merchandising began to generate the enormous wealth of the industrial nation the United States later would become. In Boston, Thomas joined his brother George in the latter’s hardware business, the first of many ventures into the commercial world that would leave him, after more than twenty years of effort, no better off than when he started.

In 1818 Charles Bulfinch received a federal appointment as architect of the capitol in Washington, D.C., where he was to supervise the reconstruction of that building, badly damaged by the marauding British during the War of 1812. The appointment necessitated a move to Washington, and Thomas joined his parents there and carried on business for six years. His father’s odd idea that all of the important buildings were already up is belied in some light verse Thomas wrote during this period, which suggests that he sees hardware as a perfectly plausible way to make his fortune:

Would you the glittering ore amass?

Stick to Lumber, Nails and Glass;

Or to civic honours climb?

Mount on Lumber, Nails and Lime.

When perplexities encumber,

Have recourse to Lime and Lumber;

When favouring breezes fill the sails

Ballast the bark with Lime and Nails

And sing the praise in varied rhyme

Of Lumber, Nails and Glass and Lime.

Thomas returned to Boston and remained in business there until 1837, when he accepted a position as clerk in the Merchant’s Bank of Boston. As he ruefully remarked in the autobiographical sketch he wrote for his Harvard classmates, His tastes had always been literary, which may in part account for his ill success in commerce. His occupation in the Bank allowed leisure, which he devoted to congenial pursuits.

After spending twelve years in Washington, Charles and Hannah also returned to Boston, and Thomas moved in to take care of them, remaining with his father after his mother’s death and behaving, as his niece said, like a daughter as well as a son. When his father died, Thomas moved to a family boarding house of the first class. In colonial America, and for long afterward, boarding houses in which rooms could be rented were much more common than apartments were, and, because they provided meals as well, single men found them a great convenience.

There, in the boarding house of a Mrs. Eaton, Thomas lived a life that was, in the words of his niece, singularly uneventful. Every morning he walked to the bank where he clerked, and every evening he walked back home to his room, where he studied and wrote. Every night he took his dinner at Mrs. Eaton’s, sitting—he must have been her most socially prominent boarder—in the place of honor at the head of the table.

Thomas’ niece provides a snapshot of his life at that time, one whose contours probably did not alter very much over the years: His room, adorned with old family portraits and furniture, was that of a student; and the volumes of Latin, Italian, German and English classics piled on chairs and sofas were only disturbed when his hospitality suggested inviting a party of his young friends to enjoy ice cream and share from his windows the pleasure of witnessing some spectacle in the square below. One of the spectacles he enjoyed was the arrival of the young Prince of Wales and his entourage on their visit to Boston.

At Mrs. Eaton’s, Thomas was free to devote his evenings to study, and long nights of scholarly investigation eventually led to publication. His first book, Hebrew Lyrical History; or, Select Psalms, Arranged in the Order of the Events to Which They Relate, with Introductions and Notes, was published in 1853. Even in Boston, this publication did not make much of a stir, but Bulfinch, encouraged by his friends, tried again, and in 1855 he brought out The Age of Fable. Bulfinch may have been partly inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys, published in 1852, in which he retold selected tales from Greek mythology, often altering them in the process. It had been successful enough with the reading public that Hawthorne followed it, two years later, with an additional volume, Tanglewood Tales. Hawthorne, gifted in invention, felt free to alter the tales he told—his King Midas, for instance, turns his own daughter into gold, a transformation not found in the original.

Bulfinch followed his classical sources far more faithfully than Hawthorne did. Even so, he felt no compunctions about altering them to suit the sensibilities of his public. With The Age of Fable, he came, at last, into his own: This book, he said in his autobiographical sketch, was popular and still holds its place in the bookstores. At the age of fifty-seven, he had at last succeeded in establishing himself as a writer—or, more accurately, a rewriter, since in the various sequels, Bulfinch never departed from the formula that had proved its merit in The Age of Fable. His cheerful reliance on the epic poems of Homer, Ovid, and Virgil in that volume was followed by just as frank a dependence on the Mabinogian, a collection of Welsh tales, and Sir Thomas Malory in The Age of Chivalry, and on Ariosto and his English translators in Legends of Charlemagne.

Among Bulfinch’s other works were an adaptation of Shakespeare for young readers; a memoir of Matthew Edwards, a young friend of his who died at an early age; and Oregon and Eldorado, a work inspired by his father’s connection to a sea expedition to the northwest coast of the United States that resulted in the discovery of the Columbia River.

Thomas Bulfinch died of pneumonia in 1867, his deathbed surrounded by family and friends. It was, as his niece said, a singularly uneventful life, especially when compared to that of his father, who married, raised a large family (seven out of eleven children survived to maturity), and played important roles in the civil and architectural development of Boston. Thomas Bulfinch chose not to play a role of prominence in the life of his city, though he served for seven years as secretary of Boston’s Society of Natural History and was active in the affairs of his church, Kings Chapel.

Bulfinch did not appear to be much concerned with any of the social reform movements of his time. Reverend Peabody remarks that one of those who knew him most intimately, said that he was deeply interested in the Anti-slavery movement, in its early period of difficulty and discouragement. At that time, he associated with William Lloyd Garrison, the leader of the abolitionists in Boston. Once the cause had been accepted, however, Bulfinch seemed to lose interest in it and said only, I stood by Mr. Garri son when it was dangerous to a man’s social position to be seen in his company. Now he has friends enough, and does not need me. The unspoken corollary to this rather odd remark is, Nor do I need him.

As for accounts of other, more intimate relationships, only one seems to offer the glimpse of an inner life that may have been less serene than Thomas wanted to show to the world. Among his youthful friends, his niece recounts, a peculiarly close tie existed between himself and an English lad of humble birth but brilliant promise and a sadly delicate constitution. Bulfinch ends his own biographical note, prepared for his Harvard College reunion in 1860, with a reference to the publication of ‘The Boy Inventor,’ a memoir of Matthew Edwards ... in whose career, arrested by an early death, [Thomas] took a warm interest.

The Boy Inventor is the only one of Thomas Bulfinch’s books to have been published anonymously and the only one with material that can be described as personal. Edwards was a bright and inventive young man who emigrated from England in search of a better life. His intelligence led him, eventually, to Mr. B. in Boston, and Mr. B. took charge of the young man’s education, helping him to learn Latin and loaning him books, and also helped him to establish himself as a mechanical engineer. The book gives a charming and moving account of the young man’s personality and character, and it is clear that the author loves his subject. The scene of Matthew Edwards’ unexpected death is poignantly written. As the Reverend Peabody goes on to tell us, Thomas had Matthew’s body buried in the family lot at Mt Auburn, and directed that his own grave should be next to that of this beloved pupil.

If there were any other such intimate relationships in Bulfinch’s life, time has covered them entirely. As for the life itself, one might imagine that a sensitive and empathetic child, responsive both to his father’s financial fecklessness and his mother’s sense of isolation from society, might change from naughty Thomas into that paragon of selfless responsibility that he was as an adult. While his parents were alive, they seem to have been his children. His niece recalls his readiness to share [their] anxieties and cares, a tendency that gave him a leading place in the family counsels. After his parents’ deaths, he lavished affection and presents on his youthful friends, his nephews, and his nieces, who responded happily to his generosity and good nature.

If Bulfinch turned his back on the kind of public life that his father embraced, he nevertheless followed his father’s example in one important way. Like Charles, who looked to Europe to provide him with the culture that would allow him to turn Boston from a city of wood to a city of brick, Thomas also looked in the same direction for the myths that would enrich American literature and society. And while it may seem to some that his choices brought him a meager and constricted existence, Thomas—having escaped from the turbulence of family life and the financial insecurities of the entrepreneurial life, having gained the freedom to come and go as he wished and to devote himself to the literary studies that so absorbed him, and having become at last a published and well-regarded author—may have found that life exactly what he wanted.

3

The book that began its life in 1855 as Thomas Bulfinch’s The Age of Fable; or, Stories of Gods and Heroes, expanded hospitably to accept his later retellings of other legends. After Bulfinch’s death, other editors stepped in, and as archaeological activities in the Near East advanced, they were able to provide editions of Bulfinch’s book with fables, as one of them put it, from Babylon, Assyria and Phoenicia. One suspects that Bulfinch would have approved. Other additions to his text, such as the illustrations of scantily clad gods and nymphs provided by another enterprising editor, might have been less pleasing to him.

Eventually The Age of Fable took a new subtitle when The Beauties of Mythology replaced Stories of Gods and Heroes. By 1913 Bulfinch and his book had become so familiar a part of the American cultural landscape that an edition appeared in which the title of the whole was contracted to Bulfinch’s Mythology, a name that its author might have found too presumptuous an identification of the man with the work, but one that works very well for us today.

In his Preface, Bulfinch firmly sets his work within the emerging American genre of self-improvement: Other kinds of knowledge may enlarge our possessions or ... raise our station in society, and there are, of course, books that will tell us how to get rich quickly and how to behave when we have amassed our pile. But, perhaps because he had seen how fortunes may disappear overnight, never to be recovered, Bulfinch puts his faith in the kind of knowledge that can make us happier and better. This knowledge is the knowledge of literature, but we cannot understand the literature of our time without first understanding the mythology that literature so often alludes to.

How is this knowledge to be attained? Bulfinch is very certain about his audience. It does not consist of members of his own class, the privileged few who have had the benefits of a classical education and would have acquired such knowledge already or at least have the leisure and the means to acquire it. His audience has never gone with Homer to Troy; the Trojan War is new to them; and they want to know how the story comes out in the end: Our readers will be anxious to know the fate of Helen, the fair but guilty occasion of so much slaughter. As Bulfinch must have known, Helen is the creation of the poets who wrote about her, and different poets provided her with different fates. Americans love happy endings, so Bulfinch sees her reconciled at last with the husband she abandoned.

Bulfinch’s audience consists of those with whom he had come in contact during his long and unsuccessful career as a merchant, the self-made men and their wives, who do not want to have to choke down only the dry facts without any of the charm of the original narrative. They want the poetry, too, and they don’t have a whole lot of time to spend on getting it.

They want to be sure that this knowledge may be let into the parlors of their homes without creating any sort of offense to pure taste and good morals. Here a word must be said about Bulfinch’s prudery: His subservience to his society’s desire to pass over these offenses in silence resulted in a number of significant omissions. It is hard to see how it could be otherwise: The proper Bostonian of Bulfinch’s day, referring to a bull as Mr. Cow, would scarcely have known what to make of Queen Phaedra’s passion for the prize bull in her husband’s herd.

Bulfinch’s readers also want the assurance that this knowledge, so different from their daily experience, is worth having: To devote study to a species of learning which relates wholly to false marvels and obsolete faiths is not to be expected of the general reader in a practical age like this. The time even of the young is claimed by so many sciences of facts and things that little can be set for spare treatises on a science of mere fancy (pp. 7-8) . It is not only the time but the energy as well. Bulfinch can sympathize with the tired businessman at the end of his long day in the office: Thus we hope to teach mythology not as a study, but as a relaxation from study.

This knowledge, easily acquired and promoting not only happiness but virtue as well, will allow the less privileged members of a restlessly mobile society access to the kind of lore that is the patrimony of the privileged. It is not, Bulfinch states explicitly, for the learned, nor for the theologian, nor for the philosopher, but for the reader of English literature, of either sex, who wishes to comprehend the allusions so frequently made by public speakers, lecturers, essayists, and poets, and those which occur in polite conversation (p. 9). It is a little bit easier than it ought to be to mock Bulfinch’s tone here, but we would be seriously underestimating Bulfinch if we were to regard him as an elitist: His sentiments are as unabashed in their democratic impulse as those of Walt Whitman, in his preface to Leaves of Grass. Bulfinch wishes everyone to have access to the cultural tokens heretofore the possession of the few.

More than 150 years later, we might well ask whether the situation described by Bulfinch still pertains to American life. We are far enough away from the society that Bulfinch knew to wonder exactly what he meant by polite conversation. If there is polite conversation going on these days, it most likely does not depend on a knowledge of Italian poets of the Renaissance, or of Sir Thomas Malory’s accounts of Arthurian tournaments, or even of the bedrock classics of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid.

Nor are any of the above much alluded to in our life, outside those venues in which polite conversation might occur. These days it is perhaps utopian to imagine that any of our politicians, racing one another into the cultural cellar, would feel themselves empowered even to mention a figure from classical mythology; nevertheless, some are old enough to remember Robert F. Kennedy’s moving evocation of Greek tragedy in his quotation from Aeschylus on the night of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But that is an exception—and the only one that comes to mind.

It is also true that our society seems even more pragmatic, more devoted to the sciences of facts and things than it was in Bulfinch’s day. We live in an age of incredibly swift technological advances, yet the evidence suggests that in our society mythology has a cultural importance even greater than it did in the age of Bulfinch.

Bulfinch was concerned with the way in which mythology was necessary to an appreciation of English literature (which would, of course, have included the emerging American literature of his time). Though many of the poets he was so fond of are no longer as widely read as they were in his time and some (Mrs. Hemans, Tom Moore) have pretty much disappeared, a great part of our literature, whether poetry, fiction, or drama, springs out of mythology.

If we look to the fiction of our time, it will be hard to find a major figure writing in English who does not allude in one way or another to one of the mythologies in Bulfinch. Indeed, the most critically important novel of the twentieth century and the most popular are generally reckoned to be James Joyce’s Ulysses, inseparably bound to Homer’s Odyssey, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, by J. R. R. Tolkien, which, along with The Hobbit, owes much to the Celtic and Germanic myths that Tolkien spent his life studying.

In drama and poetry, the situation is very much the same. There are regular revivals of plays by the three surviving Greek tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripedes, translated by some of the most important poets and writers of our time. Free adaptations of classical texts, such as T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party (which revisits the Alcestis of Euripedes) and, more recently, Charles Mee’s (re)making project that deconstructs (and reconstructs) classical drama as postmodern theatrical experiences. The classics have been adapted for the musical stage as well, with operas such as The Bassarids, a version of Euripedes’ Bacchae, by composer Heinrich Henze and librettists W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman. In poetry, numerous anthologies attest to the appeal that classical mythology still has for contemporary poets, and every year sees new translations of the epics of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid.

It is not only the ancient mythologies that have survived: The Arthurian period has been thriving anew ever since The Age of Chivalry was published, in fiction (Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court), poetry (Edward Arlington Robinson’s narrative poem Tristram) , and drama ( Camelot, the musical) . Even the more recondite tales from Legends of Charlemagne have found their way into literary culture (in the fictions of Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco) and are these days encountered in revivals of baroque