Antes de Troya

An inexhaustible source of constant artistic and intellectual reflection, the Greek myth brings us the echoes - familiar and strange at the same time - of the stories of gods and heroes that anchor us to the origins of our civilization. Evoked by the Greek and Latin epic and tragic poets, the survival of these narratives is largely due to the work of mythographers who, like Diodorus of Sicily, recorded in writing the actions of these characters of extraordinary presence in art, the Western literature and thought. At the beginning of his Historical Library, Diodorus of Sicily dedicates Book IV and Book VI (of which only the fragments collected in this volume have come down to us) to "the facts and myths of before Troy", that is, to Greek mythology. Under the generic title of Before Troy, this volume therefore offers the mythographic contribution of Diodorus of Sicily, who - under the sign of euhemerism or historicism - exemplifies as a model the way in which Greco-Latin authors reflected on their old myths.