COLLECTION
Stories connected by a shared idea.
Savitri chose a husband who had one year to live, and when Yama came for him she followed the god of death and talked until he let him go. The epic tells it to praise a faithful wife, but what wins the day is her argument.
Read story 8 min readA game of dice costs five brothers their kingdom and their wife's dignity, and eighteen days of war at Kurukshetra win it back. To win, they break the rules of battle, and the poem never lets them forget it.
Read story 12 min readA prince is sent into the forest for fourteen years, a demon king carries off his wife, and an army of monkeys helps him win her back. That is Vālmīki's Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa, one telling among hundreds that reach from the Tamil country and Bangkok to a Vietnamese tale of a yaksha king.
Read story 11 min readHis father stole a soil that grew by itself to block the flood and was put to death for it; Yu dug the waters a way to the sea and became the founder of China's first dynasty. In the oldest witnesses he is not yet a king, but a worker sent by Heaven.
Read story 10 min readA monkey born from a stone learned the arts of the immortals, ate the peaches of heaven and fought its armies until the Buddha caught him in one hand. The novel that tells it was printed in 1592 without its author's name, and the monkey himself is centuries older.
Read story 14 min readAn old woman pulls a giant peach from the river, and the boy named after it sails to the island of the oni with a dog, a monkey and a pheasant. In the oldest picture books, though, he does not come out of the peach: the old couple eat it, grow young again and have a son.
Read story 10 min readA quarrel among three goddesses, a queen carried off from Sparta and ten years of siege: no single ancient poem tells the whole Trojan War. Homer's Iliad covers about fifty days of it, and the wooden horse is not among them.
Read story 14 min readDaedalus built the labyrinth on Crete, then wings of feathers and wax to escape the king who held him there. He told his son to fly neither too high nor too low, and the sea where Icarus fell still bears his name.
Read story 13 min readOrpheus sang his way into the land of the dead and won his wife back on one condition, and a few steps from the light he looked back. That loss is first told by Roman poets; several Greek writers before them speak as if he brought her home.
Read story 12 min readHera's trick at his birth put Heracles in the service of a lesser cousin, and the labours he did for him ended with his rise to the gods. Yet the oldest poems never count the labours, and in the fullest Greek account the oracle orders ten.
Read story 11 min readA prince from Troezen sailed to Crete among the young Athenians sent to the Minotaur, came out of the labyrinth by Ariadne's thread, and forgot to change his sail on the way home. Plutarch, who tells the story most fully, also reports a Cretan version in which the Minotaur was a general named Taurus.
Read story 12 min readRostam left an armlet for the child he might have, and rode home. Years later his son Sohrab marched into Iran to find him, and the two met in single combat without knowing each other.
Read story 11 min readTo free a blinded king from the demons of Mazandaran, Rostam rode the short road alone and met a lion, a desert, a dragon, a witch and the White Div on the way. He is the greatest hero of the Persian epic, yet the Avesta never names him.
Read story 11 min readFalsely accused by his stepmother, Prince Siyavash rode through a mountain of fire and came out unharmed, then chose exile over breaking his word and was killed in the land of his father's enemy. Ferdowsi did not invent him: the Avesta already remembers his murder, and Bukhara had songs of mourning for him.
Read story 12 min readA blacksmith whose sons were fed to a tyrant's serpents tore up the king's testimonial and raised his leather apron on a spear. The Persian kings' great banner was named after him, yet the historians who describe it speak of panther skins and jewels, not an apron.
Read story 9 min readUnder Yima, says the Avesta, no one grew old or died; the day Jamshid rose into the sky on his throne, says the Shahnameh, was the first New Year. Then he called himself the maker of the world and lost his glory, and in the epic the famous cup of Jamshid is not his at all.
Read story 11 min readTwo brothers shot down a bird who claimed to be the sun, went down to the lords of death who had killed their father, beat them at their own game and rose as the sun and the moon. The K'iche' book that tells it was written in the 1550s, but Maya artists had been painting the twins for centuries.
Read story 15 min readA boy raised in hiding burns his thumb on the salmon of knowledge and grows up to lead the Fianna, the warrior bands who lived by hunting and fighting. Folk tales of later centuries made him a giant who built the Giant's Causeway; the medieval texts never do.
Read story 13 min readAt seven he killed a smith's hound and took its place; at seventeen he held the fords of Ulster alone against the armies of four provinces. The two medieval versions of his saga disagree on much, and modern Ireland has made him a symbol on both sides of its divide.
Read story 13 min readA servant who said his wealth was his own was left on a sandbank to starve, until a white bird from the west dropped the seeds of an unknown melon. In the oldest text he never carves his name on a melon or sends one out to sea: the king simply remembers him.
Read story 9 min readThe Gauls had taken Rome and were climbing its last hill in the dark when Juno's sacred geese woke the defenders. Livy tells the story in full, but Polybius, the oldest historian whose account survives, says only that the Gauls made a treaty and went home.
Read story 12 min readAn Etruscan army reached Rome's wooden bridge, and Horatius Cocles held it while the Romans cut it down behind him. In Livy he swims home to a statue and a gift of land. In Polybius, the oldest account, he leaps into the river and gives up his life.
Read story 10 min readAeneas carried his father out of burning Troy, left Dido in Carthage and won a bride in Latium by war. Virgil made him the ancestor of the Romans, but Greek writers had brought him west centuries earlier, and in the Roman story he never founds Rome.
Read story 14 min readA childless king of Kish pulls an eagle out of a pit, and the eagle carries him up towards the heaven of Anu to find the plant of birth. The tablets break off before the end, and the ancient sources disagree on whether he ever had a son.
Read story 12 min read
