Forty chapters have gone by, beginning at Chaos and coming to the night Troy burned. In between, gods and people and monsters and stars went past.
And these stories were not written by one person but passed through many mouths and many hands over hundreds of years. Even so, there are a few questions that keep coming back.
This chapter tells no new story, and strings the forty chapters back together in the order of the six parts. So that what you have read runs along one line instead of lying scattered.
The Beginning: The Same Way Three Times
The three generations of part one repeat the same thing. The one who shut his children away and the one who swallowed them both lost their place to a son. The way they were afraid was the way they came down.
Zeus was the only one who understood the loop. So he swallowed Metis, and the result was Athena born out of his head. What he meant to stop came out in another shape.
Prometheus is the first being to stand against that order. For stealing fire and giving it to people he is bound to a rock. Part one is not the story of a world coming into being. It is the story of places being settled.
Olympus: What Is Left After the Division
In part two the three brothers draw lots and divide sky, sea and underworld. You would think that ended the quarrelling. It did not. They collided again over Athens, and over Persephone.
In this part the gods are often not in the right. Hermes steals cattle on the day he is born, and Hephaestus shames two of them with a net. Midas gets his wish and only then learns what it was.
Some problems end with a division and some begin after it, and part two deals with the second kind. What makes a story is not who got what but how they behaved once they had it.
Pride: Where Was the Line
All seven chapters of part three cross a line, and the place where each crosses is different. Arachne crossed it in what she said, Niobe in what she counted.
Phaethon and Icarus fall from a height that was not theirs. Tantalus tested a kindness and Sisyphus put off his death. Midas put a word onto a judgement he did not understand, with nothing to back it.
The weight of the punishments differs too. The heaviest punishment was work that does not end. The commonest fault had the lightest punishment attached to it.
Love: That There Is Somebody on the Other Side
Part four cuts love open from seven directions. Daphne did not want it, and Narcissus saw only himself. Orpheus could not let go, and Pygmalion loved what he had carved.
All six of those tilt to one side, and only Alcyone and Ceyx face each other in equal measure. Which is why those two alone are left together as birds.
In the last chapter Artemis draws her bow at one word from her brother. What ends a bond usually comes from outside it rather than inside. It was her sisters’ words that lifted the lamp of Psyche too.
Heroes: Thanks to Whom
In the first chapter of part five Perseus wins with borrowed things, and the sandals, the helmet, the bag, the shield are none of them his. From the very first hero, nobody does it alone.
The twelve labours of Heracles are not for a prize. They are atonement. Bellerophon has never lost, and it is the winning that brings him down. Most of what Jason did belonged to the people who sailed with him.
And the last two chapters ask back. Theseus left the one who gave him the thread, Jason the one who gave him the drugs. The place of the person who paid is usually empty.
Today, What Is Left in the Sky
In part six the stories turn into stars. Callisto cannot sink into the sea, and of the seven sisters only six can be seen. One apple rolls in and becomes a ten year war, and the walls are opened from inside.
There is no tidy lesson set out in these forty chapters. The gods are often not in the right and punishment goes to the wrong person. And still these stories have survived three thousand years.
It is because they hold, without dressing it up, how people actually behave. Which is why reading myth is not a way of getting answers but a way of gaining one more eye for looking at people.
This Is Not the End
Six parts have been strung together, and the series does not close here.
Next comes a part on Zeus, three chapters. Io and Europa and Ganymede leave their names on the moons of Jupiter and on a continent.
Then three chapters on Thebes. Out of the city Cadmus founded come Oedipus and Antigone.
And then fourteen chapters of the Iliad. From the anger of Achilles to the last night of Troy. Sixty chapters in all.