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sun, moon, planets, stars, the earth with its mountains and rivers, its trees, herbs, and living creatures".

In the form of a dove upon the waves she lays the Cosmic Egg and bids Ophion to incubate it by coiling seven times around until it splits in two and hatches "all things that exist. Catching the north wind at her back and rubbing it between her hands, she warms the pneuma and spontaneously generates the serpent Ophion, who mates with her. Graves's imaginatively reconstructed "Pelasgian creation myth" features a supreme creatrix, Eurynome, "The Goddess of All Things", who rises naked from Chaos to part sea from sky so that she can dance upon the waves. Thus, for example, he conjectures an image of divine twins struggling in the womb of the Horse-Goddess, which later gave rise to the myth of the Trojan Horse. In some cases Graves conjectures a process of "iconotropy", or image-turning, by which a hypothetical cult image of the matriarchal or matrilineal period has been misread by later Greeks in their own terms. The Greek Myths presents the myths as stories from the ritual of all three stages, and often as historical records of the otherwise unattested struggles between Greek kings and the Moon-priestesses. Kings managed to evade the sacrifice for longer and longer periods, often by sacrificing substitutes, and eventually converted the queen, priestess of the Goddess, into a subservient and chaste wife, and in the final stage had legitimate sons to reign after them.

In the second stage local kings came to each settlement as foreign princes, reigned by marrying the hereditary queen, who represented the Triple Goddess, and were ritually slain by the next king after a limited period, originally six months. Graves interpreted Bronze Age Greece as changing from a matriarchal society under the Pelasgians to a patriarchal one under continual pressure from victorious Greek-speaking tribes. Graves argued in response that classical scholars lack "the poetic capacity to forensically examine mythology".

Graves's theories and etymologies are rejected by most classical scholars. Following each retelling, Graves presents his interpretation of its origin and significance, influenced by his belief in a prehistoric Matriarchal religion, as discussed in his book The White Goddess and elsewhere. The literary quality of his retellings is generally praised. Abridged editions of the work contain only the myths and leave out Graves's commentary.Įach myth is presented in the voice of a narrator writing under the Antonines, such as Plutarch or Pausanias, with citations of the classical sources. Many editions of the book separate it into two volumes. The Greek Myths (1955) is a mythography, a compendium of Greek mythology, with comments and analyses, by the poet and writer Robert Graves.