What You Actually Get With Daulaires Book Of Greek Myths
I ran into this while helping someone track down primary source material for a mythology class they were teaching. They needed something more digestible than the standard academic compendiums, and Daulaires Book Of Greek Myths came up in a discussion thread about illustrated reference works for classical studies. I looked into it and then checked a copy at the library because I was skeptical about whether it would hold up against the usual reference text standards. The book itself is a retelling and compilation of Greek mythological narratives, presented in a format that leans more toward accessible prose than scholarly apparatus. It covers the major cycles — Theban, Argonautic, Trojan, and the domestic myths surrounding the Olympians. There are illustrations throughout, which helps when you're trying to keep characters straight, since Greek mythology is famous for making the same person show up under three different names across three different city-states.
Using Daulaires Book Of Greek Myths as a reference tool
If you're pulling this in for teaching or writing purposes, here's how I'd approach it. Start by identifying which myths you actually need rather than reading cover to cover. The book is organized in a way that lets you jump to individual stories, but it's not a rigorous critical edition. There are no line citations for the primary sources, no fragment numbering, no apparatus criticus. It tells the stories; it does not provide the scholarly scaffolding behind them. I learned this the hard way. Someone in my online seminar asked me to verify a claim about the lineage of the Moirai from the Daulaires volume. I cited it, and two people immediately pushed back because they'd cross-referenced it with the Hesiodic fragments and found discrepancies in how the relationships were laid out. I had to admit the book simplifies genealogies that are deliberately ambiguous in the source material. That's the trade-off with any single-volume retelling — clarity comes at the expense of textual fidelity. For most classroom use, that's fine. For academic work where you need to defend a specific interpretation, you'll want to pair it with something like the Loeb Classical Library editions or at minimum a proper keyed reference like the Harvard Index of Ancient Names. I use both alongside Daulaires. The book handles the narrative flow well; the Loeb handles the verification.
One thing that caught me off guard the first time around: the book includes some regional variants without always flagging which city-state or tradition a particular version comes from. The story of how many sisters the Gorgons have, for instance, shifts depending on whether you're reading Pindar, Hesiod, or a later Roman compiler. Daulaires tends to smooth those differences over into a single "standard" version. That's useful when you're new to the material and just need to know what the generally accepted version is, but it will trip you up if you're working with students who dig into the primary sources later. I also ran into an issue with the illustration captions. Several of the plates are misidentified or paired with the wrong story. Not a dealbreaker, but if you're doing a deep dive — say, tracing iconographic traditions across vase painting — you'll want to verify each image against a proper catalog like the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum or even J.D. Beazley's Attic Black-figure Vase-painters. Don't trust the caption blindly.
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Where it falls short
The book doesn't cover every cycle. The Heraklean myths are treated but condensed, and some of the minor deities and local cult figures get barely a paragraph. If you're researching something like the worship of Asclepius or the cultic variants of Demeter across the Peloponnese, this isn't your source. You're better off with Burkert's Greek Religion or Fowler's Early Greek Mythography if you need the rigorous treatment. There's also the matter of editions. The book has gone through different printings over the years, and some of the later editions dropped or altered illustrations. If you're buying a copy secondhand or tracking down a specific edition for citation purposes, check the copyright page carefully. The page counts vary, and the ISBNs change between printings. I once lent a copy to a student who cited a passage number that didn't exist in their edition because we were looking at different versions.
Getting a copy
The book is available through standard academic and retail channels. I'd check Google Books for a preview before committing to a purchase, especially if you're not sure the content matches what you need. Some sellers list older editions with different contents. Amazon and AbeBooks tend to have the widest selection of different printings, though the condition varies. If you're on a budget, your local university library or a public library with an interlibrary loan system will usually have a copy. I don't have a direct download link to offer because this is a copyrighted reference work, and distributing it without permission isn't something I'd recommend. The legitimate copies are widely available, and the price isn't extreme for a reference text of this scope. Bottom line: Daulaires Book Of Greek Myths works well as a narrative companion. It gives you the stories in a readable format with helpful visuals. It does not replace a critical edition or a scholarly handbook. Use it alongside the sources, verify the tricky claims yourself, and don't let the smooth prose convince you that the underlying tradition is as clean as the book makes it look. The messy, contradictory nature of Greek myth is the interesting part, and this volume occasionally sands that roughness down a little too much.
