Book Review: A Periodic Table of Greek Mythology, ed. Miri Teixeira
A review of Working Classicists' collaboration with Contubernales Books to restructure our understanding of the ancient pantheon in a way modern students can easily digest
Greek mythology is a difficult subject to structure into a coherent hierarchy. Family trees have sufficed to represent the siblings and offspring of Kronos or Zeus, which properly center the Olympians as the major deities, but the Titans and other creatures borne by Uranus and Gaia often find themselves attached by lesser branches as an afterthought, and legendary humans like the house of Atreus lack representation altogether. The majority of the contemporary understanding of pagan religions has descended through stories rather than rituals of worship, which makes it difficult to tell how (or whether) they placed their gods on a particular rubric according to power. In accordance with the Christian tradition, Dante’s Paradiso places the wise below warriors of the faith and just rulers, who are in turn lower than the rings of the seraphim and the cherubim. St. Bernard, however, is able to enter the Empyrean despite his caste being “lower” than the angels. Faith can be a tricky thing to pin down definitively in these respects, but the human mind absorbs information best through rigid structures.
Borrowing the general outline of the periodic table to represent the common threads between certain groups is an inspired decision. A majority of the students in the demographic this book is marketed towards will be familiar with the periodic table by the time they’ll be interested in mythology on this level as well: though there is no rhyme or reason to the rows of names, the columns each feature a different common aspect to each name. Some are traditional Gods, others are demigod heroes, and one is even saved for mortals in the Trojan War. 128 entries feels like the right number of figures as well; none of the “big names” are missing, while any larger list would have to delve into city founders and individual lake and river gods; there are 50 nereids out in the world, but what we know about the majority of them could not fill up a page.
The editors’ decision to cast a wide net for contributors provides some interesting benefits as well as a few unforeseen drawbacks. Most dictionaries operate on the same basis but give less credit to the hardworking individuals that write their entries. In those cases, there tends to be a “style guide,” or a general expectation that all the participants will come from the same perspective in defining words. For example, it’s in poor taste to use a word or close etymological root in its own definition. In the case of an entangled web of deities, uniformity would detract from the presentation. Some gods, like Apollo and Dionysus, find the roots of their worship and mythology in epochs older than the Greeks themselves. In other cases, the number of muses change anywhere from 3 to 9 depending on which author one asks. Not all entries require the same structure, and the more diverse the perspectives brought to the project, the better the reader can build a coherent picture of mythology. In the same way that a tapestry connects different threads into one massive pattern, many entries also take advantage of the non-linear nature of a periodic table to connect to previous and past figures. Whereas Ovid has to begin the Metamorphoses with Chaos and the creation of the Earth, she doesn’t appear here until entry 77. By my loose count, the average article contained about six named figures from other portions of the book, meaning that students unfamiliar with a name would easily be able to flip to the table of contents to amend their understanding.
It seems as though the prompt given to the authors was to keep their article relevant to the modern student which most nailed, but a few took too literally. A handful of mentions of novels in the glut of myth retellings in the historical fiction genre happening now may be good for students of today, but a decade down the line they’re just as likely to be off the shelves and out of print. Madeline Miller’s books wouldn’t be appropriate for discussion in the classroom either, so while one author picks Jennifer Saint as a reference point, another pulls titles from the YA fiction bargain bin. Someone else uses the MTV reboot series of Teen Wolf as a connection point for Deucalion. I can’t speak to how popular that show is with teens now, but considering it started in 2011, I would guess that the point of reference is also dated to the target audience. Shaw’s Pygmalion used to be a go-to source for that old myth because of My Fair Lady’s critical acclaim, but even that play has faded from the zeitgeist. This problem is larger than what I’d expect this work to solve, but I wish some contributors had made more of an effort to preserve the longevity of their entries.
This book belongs on every classics student’s gift guide for the 2025 holiday season. Comparative works that focus on storytelling often get bogged down in selecting beginnings and endings, while denser and more “complete” volumes end up as dusty reference tomes on high shelves. The Periodic Table strikes a happy medium by adding a level of novelty to the project that the mundane re-arrangements of stories from Ovid and Hesiod totally lack. Therefore, I gladly give this book three stars.
