Be Homer's works your study and delight

Read them by day, and meditate by night;

Thence form your judgment, thence your maxims bring,

And trace the Muses upward to their spring.

Alexander Pope

All of the resources in this section are bibliographies.

• Handbooks lists most of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century collections of facts about classical mythology. Some also include retellings of myths and information about how myth is used in art and literature.
• Criticism is actually three separate bibliographies: about Homer in general, about the Odyssey, about the Iliad.
• Translations list many (but by no means all) of the English translations of the Odyssey.
• Translations Compared reproduces the same passage from Book 10 (Circe's recognition of Odysseus) in eleven translations, dating from 1616 to 2000.
• Books is a bibliography of retellings of the Odyssey, but does not include retellings that are in handbooks.
• Collections is a bibliography of portions of the Odyssey retold . As is the case in the previous bibliography, many of these retellings are for children.

Illustrations. On the upper left, a large calyx-krater (used for mixing wine with water) shows Hermes as psychopomp (guide of the dead) instructing the winged and bearded personifications, Sleep and Death, as they carry away the body of Sarpedon, the Trojan son of Zeus. In the Iliad, we learn that Zeus regretted his death but, since it was part of a chain of deaths foretold by Fate, chose not to intervene. The red-figure calyx-krater, dating to about 510, is called the Euphronios Vase, named for its painter, Euphronios. When Thomas Hoving, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, paid more than $1,000,000 for it (and deaccessioned a bunch of previous gifts to the Museum in order to pay the bill), it was briefly famous even outside of the academic world. On the upper right, a man drives a chariot on a dinos by the Painter of the Acropolis. Note the men in war helmets and the fallen warrior beneath the wheels of the chariot. To the left of the page is the warrior goddess, Athena, with her spear, helmet, and snaky cloak, with another Hermes (less easily identified) below. Just to the side of Hermes' outstretched hand, the potter of this neck-amphora, ca. 540 B.C., enscribed the vase, "Amasis made me."