The hundred stories from classical literature included in this collection owe their survival to the lasting impression they made upon the minds of those who read them. I have tried to strike a balance between what we might call ‘classic classics’, such as John Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid, and the less familiar or expected. I have included old translations, new ones, verse and prose, and a handful of my own. There are erudite but highly readable contributions from classical scholars such as Benjamin Jowett, Aubrey de Sélincourt, Martin West and the poet Robert Graves – on Caligula rather than his uncle (I) Claudius – as well as writers better known for their works of English literature. Louis MacNeice offers a fine translation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Walter Pater’s translation of ‘Cupid and Psyche’ from Apuleius’ Golden Ass is to my mind unparalleled. Percy Bysshe Shelley clearly had great fun digesting Plato’s description of the primordial separation of man from woman, in which the king of the gods ‘cut human beings in half, as people cut eggs before they salt them, or as I have seen eggs cut with hairs’.

I close this anthology with a penetrating translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy by Queen Elizabeth I. I found the monarch’s apparent sympathy with the protagonist of the story incredibly moving. It brought home to me the fact that, for all the centuries that separate us, we might just as easily find ourselves in the characters of an ancient story as those of our own world.

DAISY DUNN, 2019

Author’s note

I envisaged this anthology as a kind of grown-up version of the books of myths and legends I enjoyed as a child. While some of the stories are suitable for children, a good number of them contain sexual themes, as found in the original texts, or are stylistically aimed at the adult reader.

Within the extracts themselves, [italic type within square brackets] denotes a stage direction or other observation in the original translated text. My own occasional editorial interpolations in the texts – mainly in the form of linking passages to connect a sequence of extracts from the same text or, very occasionally, in footnotes, appear in unbracketed italic type.

THE BIRTH OF LOVE

Theogony

Hesiod

Translated by Barry B. Powell, 2017

In the beginning there was nothing but Chaos. Then came Gaia (Earth), Tartaros (the Underworld), and Eros (Love). Later, from Gaia, came Ouranos (Sky or the Heavens). As early as the seventh century BC, a Greek poet named Hesiod composed a poem on the origins of the cosmos entitled the Theogony (‘Birth of the gods’). He described the often violent geneses of the familiar ancient Greek gods out of these primordial deities. This extract from his superbly sprawling poem culminates with the dramatic birth of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, out of her father Ouranos’ severed genitals.

From Chaos came Darkness and black Night, and from Night came