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After learning about the exploits of the Primordial Beings and Olympian Gods in Mythos , we now follow their mortal offspring, the Great Greek Heroes.

"The heroes cleansed our world of chthonic terrors—earthborn monsters that endangered mankind and threatened to choke the rise of civilization. So long as dragons, giants, centaurs and mutant beasts infested the air, earth and seas we could never spread out with confidence and transform the wild world into a place of safety for humanity.
In time, even the benevolent minor deities would find themselves elbowed out by the burgeoning and newly confident human race. The nymphs, dryads, fauns, satyrs and sprites of the mountains, streams, meadows and oceans could not compete with our need and greed for land to quarry, farm and build upon. The rise of a spirit of rational enquiry and scientific understanding pushed the immortals further from us. The world was being reshaped as a home fit for mortal beings only."

This sequel had the potential to be the better book: The heroes' stories offer more narrative consistency, their myths can be presented as chronologically as the contradictory timelines of Greek mythology allows, and they are even almost self-contained. As such it should've been more straight-forward and less dense than Mythos, yet somehow, all the things that should've worked in the book's favor are to its detriment. This time we got a much-needed contents-page and several glossaries, but each story felt separate from the next, rather than a chapter of a whole, which made the volume feel episodic at best, disjointed at worst; a book to dip in and out of. While I enjoyed his tangents in the first volume, I thought that Fry went overboard with the footnotes here, often needlessly breaking the reading flow. The stories about the Titans and Gods told in the prequel were little more than primers for the uninitiated as well, but the superficiality of the heroes' stories told here was much more apparent.

I still think that it's a great introduction to the Age of Heroes and a worthy continuation of the series, but he tackled too many of the Great Greek Stories in too little space, ultimately not doing any of them the justice they deserve. The stories of Perseus, Heracles, Bellerophon, Orpheus, Jason, Atalanta, Oedipus, and Theseus are told, but he often barely scratched the surface; there was still a whole lot of dense name-dropping though, so he didn't quite manage to strike a good balance. His conversational, humorous narrative voice also often didn't work for me in this context: His witty remarks felt forced; they either didn't come through very well, or they fell flat because they're less suited to these tragic stories.

My review sounds harsher than I intended; I liked Heroes, but it didn't meet my expectations after the excellent prequel. I wish it had been more memorable; I was excited to learn more about these heroes, but I'm finding that what was new information for me simply didn't stick. I think much would've been improved if Fry had put more care into characterization over action, spending more time humanizing his heroes, and making them more relatable. I am still looking forward to the upcoming, final (?) book in the series though, which will cover the Trojan War—our Greatest Epic, which should work better as a rounded narrative, and I also suspect that it will lend itself to his dry humor better than these stories of mortals and demi-gods.

—â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä�

My reviews of Stephen Fry's Greek Myths series:

01: Mythos · ★★★★
02: Heroes · ★★�
03: Troy · ★★★★
04: Odyssey · ★★★★