Source before story
Every episode is attributed to the text that tells it. If we cannot name a source, the claim stays off the card.
Method
How the index is built
Myth Index is a reference project kept by its editors: a card file of Greek myth that shows its sources instead of hiding them.
Why a card index
Greek mythology was never a single book. It reaches us through epic and hymn, tragedy and comedy, Roman poetry, late handbooks, travel writing, and verses scratched on stone and gold. Every retelling has to choose among these witnesses, and most do it silently. We wanted a place where the choices are visible: where you can see that one detail comes from Hesiod, another from Ovid centuries later, and a third from a handbook of the Roman era.
An index suits that job. A card has room for a name, a lineage, a short list of sources and a few cross-references, and it imposes a discipline: if a claim cannot be traced to a text, it does not go on the card.
How we read the sources
We start from the ancient texts, read in standard editions and checked against more than one modern translation. Every quotation on the site is our own rendering, marked as such, so that no translator’s phrasing is passed off as ours. Where we give book and line references, we have checked them; where we are unsure, we leave them out.
When authors disagree, we report the disagreement rather than settling it. Prometheus has a different mother depending on who is writing; Persephone eats a single pomegranate seed in one account and several in another. These differences are not errors to be tidied away. They are the record, and often the most interesting part of it.
Hard grids, plain labels
The design follows the idea. Entries are numbered, set on a strict grid and labelled in plain type, like cards in a steel filing cabinet. Each article opens with an index card of facts: earliest source, family, and what the figure is known for. Sources sit at the foot of every entry, and cross-references point you to the next drawer.
The numbers are for finding and citing, not for ranking. A low number does not mean a more important myth, only an earlier place in the file.
About the images
The pictures on Myth Index are illustrations created for this site. They borrow the look of archival photographs of ancient sculpture and objects, in grainy black and white under an orange duotone, but they do not show real museum pieces and should not be cited as evidence for any ancient object. When an article discusses a real vase, relief or statue, the text names it and says where it is kept.
Disagreement is data
Where ancient authors contradict each other, we record the versions side by side and say which is older.
Our own renderings
Quotations from Greek and Latin are translated by the editors and marked as our rendering.
Folklore with respect
Later Greek beliefs are described as living tradition, with the collectors who recorded them named.
We read Greek and Latin texts in standard critical editions and compare published translations on difficult passages; all quoted renderings are our own. References follow the conventional book, line and section numbering of those editions.
A card missing from the drawer?
If a figure deserves an entry, or a card has a source wrong, write to the desk. Corrections are checked against the texts before anything is refiled.
Write to the desk