Bulfinch's mythology and the 21st century
I’ve been reading Bulfinch’s classical mythology recently. I picked it up partly because of the Bulfinch name, so famous in Boston for the elder Bulfinch’s role in the city’s architecture (although I do find the Boston Brahmin puritanical nature of the younger Bulfinch’s translation kind of comical). I’ve been impressed, as I read various myths, how many of the names are familiar: Hercules and the labors, Jason and the Golden Fleece, Echo and Narcissus, Daedalus and Icarus, and all the rest.
These stories give me such joy, and I hope I remember a few of them well enough to retell to my children. I have a great deal of trouble, however, imagining how it must have been to truly believe in these stories, rather than just finding them quaint and beautiful. How would it have felt to walk through a forest and feel that certain trees were dryads and hence had a soul? How would the Greeks have treated a spring of water, given that they assumed a spirit inhabited it? Such ideas seem absurd to modern minds, and certainly they aren’t true in a scientific sense, but they must have at least made the world a personal place, one where personalities determine your fate rather than impersonal chance.
