Author: Apollodorus of Athens

The Library of Greek Mythology is the fullest handbook of Greek myth to survive from antiquity, running from the first gods through the Theban and Trojan cycles to the homecomings that follow the war, and for a good many episodes it is the only witness left. The name on it belongs to Apollodorus of Athens, a Greek scholar and grammarian of roughly 180 to after 120 BC who studied under Aristarchus of Samothrace, left Alexandria around 146 BC and eventually settled in Athens. His own output, a verse Chronicle, a twenty-four book treatise On the Gods and a study of Homer's catalogue of ships, is lost apart from quotations in later writers. The attribution cannot hold, since the Library quotes Castor the Annalist, a contemporary of Cicero and so a century too late, which is why scholars call its unknown compiler Pseudo-Apollodorus. Robin Hard translated it for Oxford University Press with notes, a map and genealogical tables.