About
Why this exists
A periplous was a kind of book the Greeks wrote for sailors: a coastal itinerary that named each harbour in the order you would meet it, with what you would find there and what had happened. This is one of those, for stories instead of ports.
I am not a classicist. I am someone who kept running into these stories in pieces, a name in one place and a painting in another, and wanted to learn them properly. Putting them on a map is what finally made them hold together for me, so I built the thing I had wanted to read. If it is useful to anyone else, so much the better.
Every myth here is pinned to the ground it happened on, so the 58 of them can be read three ways: by place on the map, in narrative order on the timeline, or by bloodline through the family tree.
What is here
- Myths
- 58
- Places
- 48
- Heroes
- 9
- Figures
- 22
Where the stories come from
The retellings are mine. The stories are not, and I would rather you could check me than take my word for it, so every myth names the ancient text it comes from and carries that text alongside it, to read yourself.
- Apollodorus 23 myths
- Ovid 18 myths
- Homer 10 myths
- Hesiod 5 myths
- Homeric Hymn to Demeter 1 myth
- Homeric Hymn to Apollo 1 myth
Translations are the public domain ones: Frazer for Apollodorus, Evelyn-White for Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns, and the older verse Homers and Ovids.
The pictures
Painting, sculpture and engraving old enough to be out of copyright, nearly all of it from Wikimedia Commons. Where I know which work a picture is and where it came from, it says so underneath the picture.
The map
The land underneath is shaded relief rather than roads and borders, because mountains and coastlines are usually the reason a journey went the way it did. Tiles by Esri, map by Leaflet.
How exact this is
Not entirely, and the map is the looser half. Plenty of myths never name a place at all, or name one nobody can point to now, or the ancient sources disagree about which of three islands they meant. Where the ground is uncertain I have put the marker on the likeliest candidate rather than leave the story off the map, so read a pin as roughly where this is set, not as a location anyone recorded.
The summaries are mine as well, put together from what I have read and pieced together over the years. I keep them as close as I can to the text named under each one, but a summary compresses, and compressing a myth means choosing which version of it to tell. Treat all of this as a good starting point rather than an authority, and go to the source text when it matters.
Corrections
So I will have got things wrong. If you spot one, I would genuinely like to hear it, at alexis.coulombe@tutamail.com.
Made by Alexis Coulombe.