Mýty Řeků a dalších národů starověku – Bouzek Jan (2020)

The interpretation and analysis of myths in today's world, like many other scientific disciplines, struggles to find its narrow path forward between the Scylla of mundane hypercriticism and the Charybdis of fragmentation, shapelessness of arbitrary interpretation. Most myths have their origins both in the time when they were created as an attempt to project the present into the past and in certain historical events; fabulation needs as its foundation the myth of people and their stories, material to work with. Myths were alive for a long time, being modified and retold in new, adapted variants that lacked general binding authority, and were petrified only by modern philologists. Jan Bouzek, primarily a classical archaeologist, narrates the myths of the ancient Greeks and their neighbors through references to the monuments of material culture, to statues, frescoes, and paintings on ceramics, on which their (mostly unknown to us today) authors recorded mythic events without words. Thanks to the rich visual accompaniment, the reader has the opportunity not only to read but also to follow the visual storytelling about heroes, gods, and the tales of ancient events. This makes Bouzek's book exceptional.