Where this comes from
Sources
Every profile here was written from the ancient texts themselves, not from a modern retelling or a mythology website. The citation at the foot of each one names the passage it came from.
Below is the whole corpus this project reads from, with the translation used for each. Not every text has been drawn on yet; the twelve profiles currently cite the first six. Nothing is written from anything that is not on this list.
All of these translations are in the public domain, which is why they could be used at all. Modern translations are still in copyright, so none of them appear here.
| Work | Translation | From |
|---|---|---|
| The Homeric Hymns, Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days, and the Homerica | Hugh G. Evelyn-White, 1914 | Project Gutenberg #348 |
| Apollodorus, The Library | Sir James George Frazer, Loeb 1921 | Perseus Digital Library |
| Pausanias, Description of Greece | W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod, Loeb 1918 | Perseus Digital Library |
| Ovid, Metamorphoses, Books I to VII | Henry T. Riley, 1851 | Project Gutenberg #21765 |
| Ovid, Metamorphoses, Books VIII to XV | Henry T. Riley, 1851 | Project Gutenberg #26073 |
| Homer, The Iliad | Alexander Pope | Project Gutenberg #6130 |
| Homer, The Odyssey | Samuel Butler | Project Gutenberg #1727 |
| Euripides, Hippolytus and The Bacchae | Gilbert Murray, 1902 to 1911 | Project Gutenberg #8418 |
| Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound and the Seven Against Thebes | Theodore Alois Buckley, 1897 | Project Gutenberg #27458 |
| Aeschylus, the Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation-Bearers, The Furies | E. D. A. Morshead | Project Gutenberg #8604 |
| Sophocles, the seven surviving plays | Lewis Campbell, 1883 | Project Gutenberg #14484 |
| Euripides, Medea | Gilbert Murray, 1906 | Project Gutenberg #35451 |
| Euripides, The Trojan Women | Gilbert Murray, 1905 | Project Gutenberg #35171 |
| Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris | Gilbert Murray, 1910 | Project Gutenberg #5063 |
| Apollonius Rhodius, The Argonautica | R. C. Seaton, Loeb 1912 | Project Gutenberg #830 |
| Pindar, The Extant Odes | Ernest Myers, 1874 | Project Gutenberg #10717 |
| Virgil, The Aeneid | J. W. Mackail, 1885 | Project Gutenberg #22456 |
The paintings
Daily Myth uses paintings that are in the public domain, sourced from Wikimedia Commons. Each one is credited on the day it appears, with its artist, its date and the collection that holds it.
What this is not
These are readings, not scholarship. The myths are ancient and they contradict each other constantly, so every profile takes one version and commits to it. Anybody who knows the material will be able to name the version it did not take.
The translations are Victorian and Edwardian, because those are the ones out of copyright. They are not the versions a classicist would reach for today.