“Vedi Napoli e poi muori”; “See Naples and die!” is a saying one often hears, a saying which means that after seeing Naples in all her beauty one has nothing on earth left to admire.And in a certain sense this is true enough: there are but few places which in beauty of scenery can compare with the Bay of Naples. Yet a visit to Naples is not all; equally with the City of the Living, so attractive to the stranger for its life ever freshly throbbing early and late, the City of the Dead...

The deities of the ancient world — from the famous denizens of Olympus to anonymous river nymphs and sea monsters — come to life in the pages of this classic guide. Richly readable, informative, and colorful, it is drawn mostly from the great epics of Homer and the works of Apollodoros, an Athenian scholar of the second century B.C. Not only does it define the myths in terms of their influence on Western literature, it also depicts the role of the deities in everyday life, from the earlies...