Reddit Reddit reviews Metamorphoses (Oxford World's Classics)

We found 2 Reddit comments about Metamorphoses (Oxford World's Classics). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

Literature & Fiction
Books
Poetry
Ancient, Classical & Medieval Poetry
Ancient & Classical Poetry
Metamorphoses (Oxford World's Classics)
Oxford University Press USA
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2 Reddit comments about Metamorphoses (Oxford World's Classics):

u/freshprince44 · 7 pointsr/suggestmeabook

Cool, not too odd if you read way too much though lol. How about Greek or Roman stuff?

Euripedes and Sophocles are fantastic.

Antigone, Medea, Bacchae, Oedipus Rex and all that jazz are really fun and enlightening reads.

Ovid's Metamorphosis is excellent, I really like this translation (though haven't tried them all). Funny, weird, witty, intimate yet still epic.

https://www.amazon.com/Metamorphoses-Oxford-Worlds-Classics-Ovid/dp/0199537372

The Stoics are great, Meditation by Marcus Aurelius is the standard

Then you have the Odyssey, Illiad, Aenead is cool too.

Plato's republic is fun, going in a slightly different way

Freud's interpretation of dreams has all sorts of stuff to help self-reflection/growth thinking.

Joseph Campbell's Hero with a thousand faces is really fun as well.

Happy reading, kind person.

u/blackstar9000 · 3 pointsr/books

Robert Graves' 2 volume The Greek Myths is comprehensive, but there's a catch: Graves has arranged and chosen his version of the myths in order to facilitate a kind of narrative continuity that's not particularly true to the way that the Greeks understood their myths. Karl Kerenyi and Carl Kerenyi's The Greek Gods and The Greek Heroes are closer to the source material, and will give you a better sense of the variety and disagreements involved. Ultimately, though, it's a matter of preference: Do you want narrative sweep, or fidelity to tradition?

Alternately, you could go back to the sources themselves. Ovid's Metamorphoses is basically a treasury of Greco-Roman myth. Again, there's a catch: Ovid's theme is that of things transforming into something else (hence the title), so there's a definite bias in favor of myths that suit that motif. That said, Ovid is also as close as you're going to get to the original form of a lot of Greco-Roman myths, so it's hard to go wrong there.

If you really want to do some heavy lifting on the Greco-Roman myths, get a copy of Pausanius' Guide to Greece, Vol. I and Vol. II. This is basically a travelogue of Greece, written for the Roman Emperor, and it lists in detail most of the locations associated with Greek myths and legends, and gives some detail on most of the lesser known ones. There's a lot to sift through here, and you'll probably want to have an Atlas of the Ancient World on hand to get a sense of where he's talking about at any given time, so I definitely don't recommend starting out here, but if you're looking for really in-depth source material, this is the place to go.

For the Norse myths, there's the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda, as well as a slew of sagas that are worth looking into. On of the most famous is certainly The Nibelungenlied, on which Wagner based his [Ring Cycle]() (you know, "Ride of the Valkyries," and all that), which was the basis for much of Lord of the Rings. Personally, my favorite of the sagas I've read so far is the Volsungs.

For the Sumerians, the obvious starting point is Gilgamesh. Our sources are pretty fragmented, and there are editions that reflect that fragmentation, but for pure readability, I suggest the Herbert Mason retelling. Or, if you're really into it, get both and compare. The go-to author for Sumerian myth and religion in general is Samuel Noah Kramer; his book Sumerian Mythology is as good a general survey as you're likely to find, particularly if you're interested in the archeological method behind our knowledge of the Sumerians.

What else? For the Egyptians, E. A. Budge is your man. Dover Books in general has a good series of older, public domain works on mythology, including books on Japanese and Chinese mythology. I wish I had some sources to give you on meso-American or African myth, but those are areas of inquiry I'm just delving into myself. But then, you're probably overwhelmed as it is.

Good luck.