Apollodorus

A handbook of the myths, from Sky forward

The Library is a compact handbook of Greek myth. It begins at the beginning: “Sky was the first who ruled over the whole world” (1.1.1). From there it works forward by descent, generation after generation, and then takes the lines of the heroes house by house. The work goes by two names, the Library and its Greek title, the Bibliotheca.

The author names his authorities as he goes, and leaves them disagreeing. On the parentage of Io, a priestess of Hera whom Zeus loved, he writes that “the annalist Castor and many of the tragedians allege that Io was a daughter of Inachus”, and sets beside it the version of the early Greek poet Hesiod, who made her a daughter of Piren (2.1.3).

Nobody knows who wrote it

Nothing certain is known about the author. A reader of the ninth century AD calls him Apollodorus the Grammarian, and the manuscripts of the book describe him as Apollodorus the Athenian, Grammarian. Both point to one man, an Athenian scholar of that name who flourished about 140 BC and wrote a treatise on the gods in 24 books, now lost.

Modern scholars reject the identification. The lost treatise set out to explain the gods away, resolving them into powers of nature or into dead men and women. The Library explains nothing and criticises nothing; it gives the traditional stories as it found them. The work still goes under the name on the book.

The date the work gives away

The author quotes the annalist Castor, a writer of chronicles taken to be a contemporary of the Roman statesman Cicero. If that dating holds, the Library cannot have been composed earlier than about the middle of the first century BC, about ninety years after the Athenian grammarian it is named for.

Nothing fixes the other end. The author gives no account of himself and never mentions the events of his own time. Rome and the Romans are not mentioned anywhere in the work. The latest things it records are the death of Odysseus and the return of the Heraclids, the descendants of Heracles.

Where the text breaks off

Three books survive, and they stop in mid-course. The last section describes the second of the killings Theseus works on his road to Athens: Sinis the Pine-bender, who lived at the Isthmus of Corinth and made passers-by bend pine trees until the trees threw them (3.16.2).

A separate text, the Epitome, carries the rest. It resumes the same sequence at the fourth killing, Sciron the Corinthian, and runs on through the Trojan material to the end of Odysseus, for whom it gives more than one account. In one of them he goes into exile in Aetolia, marries the daughter of Thoas and dies in old age. Without it the handbook would have no Troy and no homecomings.

The Attic foundation, and the olive still shown

Cecrops, a son of the soil with a body half man and half serpent, is the first king of Attica in the Library. The country had been called Acte, and he named it Cecropia after himself. In his reign the gods resolved to take possession of cities, each to receive its own worship. Poseidon reached Attica first and struck the middle of the acropolis with his trident, raising the sea they now call Erechtheis. Athena came after him, called Cecrops to witness what she did, and planted an olive tree.

When the two strove for the country, Zeus set the twelve gods to judge between them. They gave Attica to Athena, because Cecrops testified that she had been the first to plant the olive, and she named the city Athens after herself. Poseidon flooded the Thriasian plain in anger (3.14.1). The author then adds a line of his own: the olive tree is still shown in the Pandrosium, an enclosure on the acropolis.