Myths are the oldest literature — the stories humans told to explain the world, the gods, and themselves. Here are the epics and legends at the root of the Western imagination.
The deep stories a culture tells about itself
Before there was history, there was myth. Every culture begins by telling itself a story about where it came from, who its gods are, and what a hero is for. These stories are not primitive science to be outgrown — they are something else, a way of holding truths too large for ordinary statement.
This collection gathers the foundational myths and epics available in the public domain. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey stand at the head of Western literature — rage and homecoming, the two great subjects. Virgil built Rome a myth to match. Ovid gathered the Greek and Roman tales into the endlessly retold Metamorphoses. Bulfinch made the whole pantheon accessible to modern readers; Malory gave England the Arthurian cycle; the Norse and Celtic traditions add their own gods and doom.
Read them and you will recognize everything: the quest, the descent to the underworld, the hero's flaw, the trickster, the return. These are the patterns every later story is built from. To know them is to read all of literature with better eyes.