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Robert L. Fowler. Early Greek Mythography. Volume 2: Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. xxi, 848. $250.00. ISBN 978-0-19-814741-1.
The first volume of this now complete project was an edition of the fragments of twenty-nine early Greek mythographers, from Hekataios and Akousilaos to the early fourth century. The two writers just named, like others in this edition, are also called logographers and early Greek historians, not without reason (see Fowler's "Herodotus and his Prose Predecessors" in C. Dewald and J. Marincola [eds.], The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus [Cambridge, 2006]). Fowler, however, printed only the mythological fragments of his canon of twenty-nine and thus gave us a synoptic view of early Greek mythography never available before, impossible to get from Jacoby's Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (or from Brill's New Jacoby).
The second volume is commentary. It is divided into two parts: (A) mythological and (B) philological. In (A), Fowler discusses the fragments under twenty headings (for example, "Theogony" or "Attic Legend"); in (B), he provides an introduction to each author and comments on textual problems, dates, and so on. His introduction (xi-xxi) is a masterful, brief account of the place of the mythographers in Greek intellectual history of their time.
The indexes make this second volume accessible from...