On the other hand, if the Libraryis read consecutively, the reader may feel that it is not as elementary as all that. Within its brief confines it contains a remarkable quantity of information, and much that a reader with a fairly comprehensive knowledge of Greek mythology would not expect to hold in mind. Perhaps the work was intended not as a primer, but as an epitome of mythical history for a general if unsophisticated readership. As we have already observed, there was an extensive literature of this kind in the Roman period, and the part that popular handbooks and epitomes played in transmitting many aspects of Hellenic culture to a broad public should not be underestimated. For their knowledge of philosophy, for instance, many Greeks of that period would have relied on handbooks summarizing the opinions of the different schools on each of the standard questions. Works of such a kind may have been aimed at a relatively uncultivated audience, but they were not written specifically for use in schools.

Taken as a whole, the Libraryamounts to far more than an anthology of mythical tales. For it offers a full account of each of the main cycles of myth, and thence a complete history of mythical Greece, organized on a genealogical basis, family by family; all the main stories are there, each situated in its proper place in the overall structure. From this perspective it could well be argued that the author wanted to provide the general public with a summa of Greek myth in epitome form; and that in a modest way, his aim was encyclopaedic. In a recent French edition of the Library, J.-C. Carrière has advanced some interesting arguments in favour of this view. Although this is ultimately a matter of judgement, and a full consideration of the question would require the examination of a number of different issues, I would like to consider a single aspect of the work which seems to favour such a view.

Even a casual reader of the Librarywill be struck by the profusion of names. The narrative may often be brief and bare, but the author was immensely thorough in recording the names of all the figures associated with the heroic families and the main episodes in heroic mythology. Most of these names appear in various catalogues, or in the genealogies which punctuate the histories of the great families of heroic mythology; let us first consider the catalogues, which serve less of a practical function than the genealogies.

In such a short work, the author devotes a surprising amount of space to these catalogues, which sometimes take up more than a page. Instead of merely reporting that the fifty daughters of Danaos married the fifty sons of Aigyptos and, with one exception, murdered them on their wedding night, Apollodorus lists all the brides and their husbands, and tells us who their mothers were (pp. 61–2). Only two of the Danaids are of any significance thereafter. Similarly, the fifty sons of Lycaon, who met a premature death, are listed by name, and all the suitors of Penelope (although there is no such list in the Odyssey, Apollodorus’ main source at this point), and the many children of Heracles by the fifty daughters of Thespios and other women. In certain cases such catalogues could be of practical interest even to those first approaching the study of Greek mythology, as with the catalogue of the Argonauts (pp. 49–50), or the catalogue of ships (pp. 148–9), which gives the names of the Greek leaders at Troy, and their origins and the relative strength of their contingents. But generally this is gratuitous information. Such catalogues were nevertheless valued in the Greek tradition, as in many other mythical traditions, as a matter of record, and it is understandable that our author should have wished to include the more important catalogues when summarizing the tradition. It may be doubted, however, that any author would wish to burden a digest for schoolchildren with catalogues listing over six hundred and fifty names (excluding patronymics).

The genealogies are equally comprehensive. The histories of the heroic families are interspersed with genealogies which list the full succession in each family, even if no significant stories are associated with the figures in a particular generation, and usually catalogue all the known children of each marriage, even if most are not mentioned again (and may be otherwise unknown). In this way, complete family trees are built up for each ruling line, partly as a matter of record (and here completeness can be seen as a virtue in itself, even if many of the names which appear are no more than names), and partly because these genealogies provide the main principle of organization in mythical history. In many mythical traditions, the myths tend to tell of events that happened ‘once upon a time’, in an indefinite past. This is rarely the case in Greek mythology, and heroic mythology in particular was ordered into a fairly coherent pseudo-history. This history was necessarily organized on a genealogical basis, because the succession of generations in the families ruling in each centre provided the only possible chronological measure. Only when plausible family trees had been constructed was it possible to locate each figure or mythical episode at its appropriate position in time, and thus construct a history in which these could be viewed in due relation. Considering the multiplicity of the independent centres in Greece, and the mass of mutually inconsistent myths and legends which would have been transmitted in the oral tradition within these various centres, the economy of the pan-Hellenic genealogical system recorded in the Libraryis impressive. There are only six main families, and each family tree is sufficiently detailed to allow each figure or story to be assigned to its definite place. To gain a full understanding of this body of myth as a coherent history, it is necessary to master this system. The genealogies in the Librarygive its readers the resources to do so. In this respect, it cannot be said that the book merely records matter that a well-educated person would have known; for the genealogies are by no means simple, and would not easily be committed to memory.

To draw a tentative conclusion from these brief reflections, there are aspects of the work which suggest that the common (but by no means universal) view that the Librarywas written for use in schools is open to serious question. It could well have been written as a summary handbook for a more general audience (although schoolmasters may also have found it useful), and the author’s concern for completeness and inclusion of full genealogies ensures that it has genuine virtues both as a summary of the tradition and a reference work. The shortcomings of the work derive from its extreme brevity rather than any essential flaw in the compiler’s approach to his task.

The material in the Libraryis drawn from a wide variety of sources, whether original poetic sources, from early epic to the learned compositions of the early Hellenistic poets, or mythographical compilations which offered prose summaries of mythical tales. Since the author’s main purpose was to provide an account of the most important early myths, we might expect that he would have been interested primarily in earlier sources, in particular early epic and the works of the fifth-century chroniclers, who were amongst the earliest prose writers. If we consider which sources are cited most frequently by name, we find some confirmation of this. Of poets, Hesiod is named most often (eleven times) and then Homer (five times), and of prose writers, two less familiar figures, Pherecydes (thirteen times) and Acousilaos (ten times), who wrote on mythical history in the fifth century BC. This provides only an approximate measure because Apollodorus sometimes cites authorities for specific traditions or variants, but rarely indicates the main source that he was following in each stage in the work. The emphasis on early historical and epic sources is nevertheless significant.