I discovered Greek mythology when I was eight.

School was a one-room building with a wood-burning stove and no plumbing, one teacher, eight grades, about a dozen students in any given year.  There was an entry hall where the firewood was stacked and where in winter we hung our coats, mittens, scarves, and caps and lined up our galoshes against the wall.  This was the fifties, but some of our textbooks predated the war, including the small thick brown volume illustrated with black and white reproductions of classical paintings and vintage photographs that was mine for the fourth grade, my first history book.

In this book I encountered Rome and Carthage, the Magna Carta, Marco Polo, the discovery and exploration of the New World, the battles of Lexington and Bunker Hill, Napoleon, the Civil War, the League of Nations.  It was history as a series of stories aimed at young readers, so I suppose it's not surprising that it included both King Canute and Alfred the Great, Remus and Romulus as well as Julius Caesar, Old Testament tales like Joseph and the Pharaoh, David and Goliath, but most glorious of all, the Greeks with their myths and their gods.

I'd already read the stories of Pandora and the Golden Fleece in books at home, but now I discovered the Trojan War and the wanderings of Odysseus, the legends of Theseus and Prometheus, the Olympian gods with their intrigues, jealousies and rivalries.  It was the most thrilling stuff I'd ever come across, and I wanted more.

The newest books in the school were a set of the World Book encyclopedia, and I had the good luck in the fourth grade to sit next to the bookshelf where they sat.  I usually finished my lessons with time to spare before reviewing them with Mrs. Hartson, and used that time to hunt through the World Book for anything to do with myths.  I quickly learned the use of an index and methodically worked through every sub-reference under "Mythology", looking up the entries in the "see also" list at the end of each article, following every branch until it looped back on itself or petered out.  I found Greek stories that weren't in my history book, as well as different versions of stories I already knew, tales from Norse and Asian mythologies, folklore and legends.  My determination to extract every shred of information related to myths led to some unexpected places, like a branch I followed from Valhalla and Valkyries, through Brunhilda to Wagner's Ring Cycle and plot synopses of famous operas.  Mythology opened a new window to the world for me.

My mother disapproved of violent comic books.  I think she must have been one of those parents who got alarmed by The Seduction of the Innocents, and I wasn't allowed to read anything stronger than Scrooge McDuck.  So instead of Superman and Batman, my superheroes were Perseus, Jason and Thor, who succeeded to the place of honor reserved by the many Jacks and other plucky lads whose adventures I had heard over and over again, sitting beside my grandmother on her bed as she read to me from the Red, Green, Blue and Yellow Fairy Books of Andrew Lang.

But even when I was big enough to pick out my own comics, I kept my interest in tales of gods, titans and legendary heroes.  As I grew up I discovered T. H. White's Arthurian epic The Once and Future King, Mary Renault's magnificent retelling of the life of Theseus in The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea, had my mind opened up by James Fraser's The Golden Bough and Joseph Campbell's The Hero with 1,000 Faces.

I got another perspective on Greek mythology in a graduate seminar on Greek and Roman theatre at Berkeley in the '70s.  It was an opportunity to experience these stories as interpreted by the greatest poets of Athens at the height of her civilization, in whose hands the raw material of gods, heros and legends was crafted into artistic and philosophic explorations into the nature and meaning of existence.

In the works of Euripides in particular, the Olympian gods are sometimes emblems of extreme human passions, and in other cases metaphors for the pitiless power of natural forces.  In one of his plays, Ion, Apollo is depicted as having raped a young women, and later lying through the Delphic oracle to cover up his crime.  It's an astonishing depiction of a deity, especially when you consider that the Greek tragedies were presented as the centerpieces of an annual religious festival sponsored by the city-state, and that the pronouncements of the oracle at Delphi were regularly consulted on matters of state and considered in both religious and political orthodoxy to be the infallible word of a god.

When you consider the Greek myths in the context of the society from whom we inherited them, as part of a religious system, it's apparent that the meanings attached to them by the people who actually lived in that society varied over a wide range of belief from naive credulity to spiritual awe and inspiration, informed skepticism and outright cynicism -- not very different, in fact, from the range of belief in the myths and traditional stories that comprise much of the literature of the dominant religions in our own times.

A couple of differences between the religious ideas of the Greeks of twenty-six hundred years ago and current belief strike me as particularly significant.

First, I'm not aware of any set of codified, authoritative sacred texts which were considered to be immutable truth, the way contemporary fundamentalists view the Koran, for example, or the Bible.  Artistic reinterpretation not just of ancient stories but also of the natures and characters of the gods themselves was not only tolerated, but encouraged, supported and honored as a vital element of religious practice in classical Athens, the society that laid the foundations of art, philosophy and science for all of Western civilization.

Second, the Greek creation myth traces the genesis of all gods, demigods, titans, humans, animals back to a single divine ancestress, Gaia the All-Mother, the Earth.  Even her consort, Ouranos the sky god, is first her son.  This explanation of the origin of our living world is a simple precise metaphor that expresses in poetic terms what we in the twenty-first century know to be true from the last six hundred years of scientific discovery.  We all come from the Earth and to her we return, like a drop of rain flowing to the ocean.

Looking back five and a half decades after my introduction to the Greeks, I have to say I think they got some things right.

You could do a lot worse.