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Quite a lot of good information and spirited analysis in here if you can struggle past Rose's rather Victorian lexicon of “barbarians”, “civilisation”, “savages” as he attempts to shove myths into an inadequate and restrictive cataloguing structure with labels like: “märchen” v. “pseudo-religous”, “east” v. “west”, “genuine folktale” v. “rubbish”, etc. The author has the unfortunate tendency to promote the value of western culture at the expense of the “backwards” east. While the book maintains some value, Rose's pro-western bias is so pronounced that I cannot discount the damaging effect of his jaundiced view upon his evaluation of eastern influences. The “märchen” cross-cultural theme comparisons in Chapter 10 at first seemed to hold promise but turned out a bit barmy. As in Hamilton, there's a brief addendum of Italian mythology which was very interesting.
A very in-depth guide to Greek mythology. I would give it five stars except the amount of run-on sentences was too much. Since the whole book is about being informative, I fell that an information dump plus strung-out sentences made the book harder to follow. Other than that, the book was very straightforward and had a wonderful chronological line (which I know is very hard to do in mythology where there are several writers).
A extremely dull and thick explanation of Greek mythology that is definitely tinted by the author’s beliefs and opinions. There are better handbooks out there.
This book provides an exhaustive overview of Greek mythology from the beginning of the world up through Roman appropriation. Rose's tone is definitely/hilariously a bit arch and at times not-exactly progressive or pc when it comes to non-heterosexual activity among the ancients, but given that he was writing in the Dark Ages (1959), we can forgive.