The Universe, The Gods, And Men

This is a book for anyone who grew up reading Greek myths and loving those stories.

Unlike other collections, this book has an overarching narrative continuity. Almost all it's characters, whether gods or human beings, are connected by genealogy. And their stories offer a vivid sense of the world as the Greeks understood it. The forces of nature, the divine, and the place of man within the whole are evoked effortlessly in a narrative that retains the magical quality of myth and reads with the compelling momentum of a good novel.

Opening with the creation of Earth out of Chaos and the castration of Uranus, Jean-Pierre Vernant goes on to recount with a new freshness and simplicity the birth of the Titans and their war against Zeus and the Olympian gods, and tales of Prometheus, Pandora, Odysseus, Dionysius, Oedipus, Perseus, and other beloved figures of legend whose narratives lie at the origin of our own civilisation.