Ancient Greek and Roman Mythology is preserved in the works of gifted poet/story-tellers, such as Homer and Sophocles, Virgil and Ovid. The stories are about the fancies and visions of primitive peoples, yet they shed little light on what primitive man was really like. But they shed considerable light, for example, on what the Greeks were like-interesting to us because much of our culture is the direct descendant of early Greek culture. In these writings, we see the emergence of a new era in the annals of human development. A new outlook on life was unfolding. There was a new view of creation in which man was seen, for the first time, as the most important thing in it. And for the first time, man began to see images of the gods in his own self-image. This was in sharp contrast to primitive man’s images of monster gods.
Writing in this tradition, the Roman Poet, Ovid, tells the story of Phaethon, whose mother was…
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