Art and Myth in Ancient Greece

The Greek myths are so much a part of our visual and literary culture that we tend to forget how they entered it in the first place. The most familiar sources are the great works of Homer or the Greek dramatists but they were addressing an audience intimately familiar with the stories and so are often allusive and incomplete. There is no surviving account in ancient Greek literature of stories as important as the fall of Troy or Theseus, and the Minotaur, and it is to the visual sources that we have to turn to much of our knowledge of the myths.