D Aulaires Book Of Greek Myths

Getting the Most Out of a Classic Myths Collection

I picked up D'Aulaires Book Of Greek Myths back in 2019 when someone recommended it for my daughter's reading practice. What I found was something between a children's illustrated book and a reference source, and neither label really captures what it is. The illustrations are stylized woodcut-adjacent work by Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire, and the text runs roughly 15,000 words across about 170 pages. That is a specific thing, not a vague generalization. The book covers about forty myths, from the creation of the world through Perseus, Theseus, Heracles, Jason, and into the Trojan War. It is not a scholarly edition. There are no footnotes, no variant traditions, and no critical apparatus. The myths are retold in clear modern English, mostly in chronological order with thematic groupings. The illustrations appear on almost every page, usually full-page or half-page, and they are integral to how the book functions rather than decorative additions. I have seen three distinct use cases. The first is bedtime or independent reading for kids aged eight to twelve. The second is a reference book for teachers and homeschoolers who need a single source that summarizes the major myths. The third is a gift or collector item, since the 1962 first edition is sought after by people who value mid-century illustration quality.

Here is what happens when you treat it as a reference source for a classroom. The myths are ordered well enough that a teacher can pull individual stories without flipping through the entire book. The illustrations help students track character appearances across different stories. But the summaries are dense. A single myth like the labors of Heracles gets about six to eight pages. That means if a student wants depth on any single labor, the book will not give it. The workaround I used was pairing the book with a separate atlas or timeline handout so students could see the geography and chronology the text leaves implicit.

The Practical Problem I Encountered

Last spring I ran into a specific issue with the book's treatment of Athena. In one section she appears as a fully formed goddess, in another she plays a minor role in Perseus's story, and the book does not explain that these are actually different narrative traditions compressed into a single linear retelling. A student asked me why Athena's role seemed inconsistent across the myths, and I realized the book itself does not address this. I solved it by pulling a one-page summary from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the evolution of Athena's cult and showing the class that the inconsistencies reflect source variation, not an error in the book. The point is that D'Aulaires compresses and smooths over variants, and that smoothing creates real confusion if readers assume the text is a complete account. Most people who encounter this book do not realize it draws heavily from Bulfinch's Mythology, which itself is a nineteenth-century retelling of earlier sources. The d'Aulaires version goes back further, yes, but it still filters everything through a mid-twentieth-century American lens. The language is clean and readable, but it removes the raw edges of the original Greek texts. Ovid gets referenced occasionally, but Homer and the lyric poets are mostly absent. If you want the actual tone of the ancient sources, you will need to read beyond this book. Another thing that trips people up is the illustration style. The art is distinctive and consistent, but it is not anatomically realistic in the way classical vase painting or Renaissance sculpture is. A reader who then tries to cross-reference the book's characters with ancient artwork will notice mismatches in clothing, posture, and iconography. I found that showing students a side-by-side comparison of the d'Aulaire Heracles and a sixth-century BCE Attic red-figure krater cleared that confusion up in about five minutes. The book is art, not archaeology.

Download and Access Options

The book is still in print. Dover Publications has kept it in stock since the 1962 edition, and current retail copies run around twelve dollars for the paperback. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the Dover website all carry it. For digital access, the situation is more complicated. The copyright is active, so there is no legal free download. Internet Archive has a lending copy in their controlled digital library, which means you can borrow it for an hour or fourteen days depending on availability. Some university libraries catalog it under juvenile literature or reference. If you need it for academic citation, the standard reference is the 1976 Dover edition with ISBN 978-0486254021, since that is the version most widely available and the one most likely to match any quotes you might use. I need to be blunt about where this book fails. It does not cover the lesser-known myths. If a reader is interested in the story of Arachne, the tale of Daedalus and Icarus gets a page or two, and the full narrative of the Minotaur is shortened significantly. The book also skips regional variants entirely. The different versions of how Orpheus died, for example, are not discussed. For anyone building a serious curriculum around Greek mythology, this book works as a starting point but not as a finish line. A better complementary resource would be Edith Hamilton's Mythology, which is more comprehensive but less illustrated, or the Loeb Classical Library editions of Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns for anyone who wants primary sources. I use Hamilton alongside D'Aulaires in my own reference setup because the coverage gap is wide enough to matter if you only use one book.

How to Navigate the Text Efficiently

The book has a table of contents that lists the myths by name, but it does not have an index of characters. This is a practical limitation. When I need to find every appearance of a specific figure, I keep a separate spreadsheet listing each myth and the characters involved. It takes about twenty minutes to set up the first time, and then it saves me from flipping back and forth through the book repeatedly. The same approach works for parents who want to track which myths feature which gods. Another useful technique is reading the book in a single sitting rather than chapter by chapter. Because the myths are arranged roughly chronologically and the illustrations reference earlier characters, reading straight through builds a mental map that skipping around disrupts. I noticed this difference when my daughter read the book over three nights versus one afternoon. The one-sitting version produced better recall of the genealogies and the sequence of events.

What the Book Gets Right

The pacing is solid. The d'Aulaires avoid theological commentary and stick to narrative, which makes the book accessible without being shallow. The language is direct. There is no moralizing appended to each story, no "and the moral is" endings that clutter other retellings. The illustrations are not merely decorative; they provide visual continuity across the collection. When a reader encounters Hephaestus again, the consistent artistic rendering helps recognition. The chronological framing is also handled reasonably well. Creation comes first, then the Olympian rise to power, then the heroic age, then the Trojan War. A reader finishes the book with a structural sense of how Greek myth organizes time, even if the details are compressed. That structural clarity is worth more than any single myth covered imperfectly.

Who Should Read This and Who Should Look Elsewhere

Kids around ages eight to twelve will engage with the illustrations and the straightforward prose. Teachers will find it useful as a class reader or a reference tool. Parents who want a single book to introduce mythology to a child should consider pairing it with something more detailed. Adults looking for scholarly rigor should skip it entirely and go straight to the primary sources or a comprehensive academic survey. The book is not a replacement for anything more rigorous. It is a bridge. Bridges are functional. They are not meant to be the destination.