Old Greek Stories - The Siege Of Troy And The Wanderings Of Ulysses

Old Greek Stories - The Siege of Troy and the Wanderings of Ulysses (1897) by Charles Henry Hanson – T. Nelson and Sons – ISBN: None – Condition: Good

Before cinema discovered that Greek mythology could be improved by adding enormous budgets, questionable accents and men with unusually polished abdominal muscles, there were books like this.

Published in 1897 by T. Nelson and Sons, Charles Henry Hanson’s Old Greek Stories - The Siege of Troy and the Wanderings of Ulysses takes two of the great foundations of Western storytelling — the Trojan War and the extraordinary journey home of Ulysses — and retells them for a broad reading audience in the clear, vigorous style of the Victorian period.

And what material he had to work with.

First, there is Troy: armies, kings, pride, betrayal, prophecy, quarrelling gods, extremely poor relationship decisions and one very famous wooden horse which really should have raised more questions than it apparently did.

Then comes Ulysses, or Odysseus if you prefer the Greek form of the name, who finishes one enormous war only to discover that getting home is going to be considerably more complicated than expected.

His return journey includes monsters, enchantresses, shipwrecks, divine interference, dangerous islands, bad navigation, worse luck and a succession of incidents that make modern complaints about delayed trains seem embarrassingly minor.

At the heart of the book are stories that have survived for thousands of years because they contain almost everything human beings appear unable to stop doing: falling in love unwisely, becoming jealous, boasting, fighting, ignoring warnings, offending supernatural beings and then acting surprised when events deteriorate.

Hanson presents these legends in the tradition of nineteenth-century classical storytelling, when ancient Greece was considered both educational and entertaining and children could apparently be trusted with tales involving war, revenge, monsters and divine punishment without anyone demanding a content warning.

There is something particularly appealing about reading Greek mythology in an edition this old. The stories themselves were ancient when Queen Victoria was young, and this particular volume has now survived well over a century on top of that. The result is a book that feels less like a modern retelling and more like a small surviving piece of the long tradition through which these stories have been handed down.

This copy is in Good condition, especially considering that it dates from 1897. It has therefore successfully survived the Victorian era, two world wars, decimalisation, the invention of television, the internet and generations of people deciding that old books should probably be thrown away because nobody reads them anymore.

It also has no ISBN, largely because the ISBN system was still approximately seventy years away from existing when this book was printed. This is therefore from the glorious period when books were apparently allowed to exist simply by having a title, an author and a publisher.

Ideal for collectors of Victorian books, enthusiasts of Greek mythology, readers interested in Troy and Ulysses, admirers of antique children’s literature, or anyone who would like to own something published before aeroplanes, radio broadcasting and most of the modern world had properly got started.

Another venerable survivor from Crappy Old Books — containing war, monsters, gods, heroic voyages and one of history’s most successful examples of somebody saying, “Let’s bring that enormous suspicious wooden object inside the city. What could possibly go wrong?”

Keep browsing: See more Ancient Classics books Other books by Charles Henry Hanson