Preserved in the D scholia and probably from the Mythographus Homericus is, for example, a different version of the story told in the Iliad about the rebellion of the gods against Zeus.31 In the Iliad, Hera, Poseidon, and Athena are identied as the gods who sought 2 5 0 16:49 P1: JzG 9780521845205c07 CUFX147/Woodard 978 0521845205 Printer: cupusbw June 29, 2007 Cambridge Collections Online Cambridge University Press, 2009

Hellenistic Mythographers to overthrow Zeus (1.399400). In a long narrative of this rebellion, a D scholion names the ringleaders: Poseidon and Hera and Apollo and Athena plotted to bind him and then subdue him. The scholion describes punishment taken by Zeus against only three of the gods; Athena seems to escape their fate. At the end of the entry comes this statement about the source of the story: Didymus tells the story [histore]. This scholion does not discuss the signicance of the participation of the various gods, as other scholia on the lines do, and seems to conate versions without regard for the differences. But it does cite a learned source for the variant, the Homeric commentator Didymus of the rst century BC, and it uses the verb histore, which we have already seen in the marginal notes to the mythographies of Parthenius and Antoninus Liberalis.

Modern scholars have identied a number of writers of the Hellenistic era as mythographers, writers who collected stories of gods and heroes from a variety of sources and presented them in unadorned prose narratives. Almost none of these mythographers survives intact; for most, we have either fragments cited in later authors, often in scholia, or only a name with or without a book title. This means that we must depend on reconstruction and analogy in our studies of these authors, but they form an interesting and neglected part of the Hellenistic literary culture. Mythographies seem to have been compiled for a wide range of purposes. They could serve a scholarly function, providing readers of archaic and classical poetry with explanations of myths and rituals, and offering explanations for place names. In this regard, they were the scholarly counterpart of essays on grammar and language in the early poets. Some of the material from these mythographies seems to have been abstracted and

Such students needed more basic help than scholars, so were given stories of the gods as well as explanations of verb forms and glossaries for obscure and difcult words. Mythographies might also have provided reading material which was interesting, but not taxing to the reader. In this guise, it could be seen as a parallel to paradoxography, in which oddities from the natural world were compiled for reading pleasure.