How this manuscript is made

Why a scroll

Greek myths come down to us in pieces. A story may begin in a line of Homer, gain a scene in a tragedy, find its fullest shape in a handbook written centuries later, and survive into modern times in a village custom no ancient author recorded. Most retellings smooth those pieces into a single tale. We wanted a place that keeps the joins visible.

So we chose the oldest model we know for careful reading: the manuscript. A scribe copied a text by hand, marked its sections in red, and wrote corrections, cross-references and second thoughts in the margins. That is what we try to do for each myth – copy it out fairly, and show our working beside it.

How we read the old authors

Every folio starts from the ancient sources themselves: epic and hymn, lyric and tragedy, the mythographers and the travellers. We name the author who tells each episode, and when two authors disagree – about a hero’s father, the order of the labours or who killed the serpent – we say so rather than choosing in silence.

Quotations are our own renderings from the Greek or Latin, and are marked as such. We give book and line numbers only when we are sure of them. For later folk belief we rely on the travellers, churchmen and folklorists who actually recorded it, and we describe those customs with the respect owed to the communities that kept them.

Red letters and margins

The look of the site follows the manuscript. Each folio opens with a red initial, and a list of rubrics stays beside the text so you can move through its sections. The short notes set next to a story – its sources, its family, what the figure is known for – are our marginalia, the things a good scribe would jot down for the next reader.

The glossary plays the part of the word-list bound into the back of an old book: a place to look up the rites, objects, places and creatures that recur across the stories, with their Greek spellings and a pointer to the folio where each one matters most.

The engravings

The pictures that head each folio are illustrations made for this site, drawn in the manner of an old engraved book plate, in brown ink with fine cross-hatching. They are not reproductions of historical prints or of ancient objects, and they show the myths as we imagine them rather than as any single source describes them.