The Greek and Roman gods were not a nice bunch. Divine paterfamilias Zeus was a serial rapist. Aphrodite, the vain love goddess, reveled when men fought to win her fickle attentions, fueling wars and vendettas. Artemis and Apollo were so jealous that they slaughtered a dozen-odd children whose mother had bragged about them, then turned her to stone for good measure. The gods were no kinder to their kin, driving poor Vulcan, the lame blacksmith, to live underground, which he repaid by sending earthquakes their way.

Such unpleasantries were not to be found in the bestselling American book of classical mythology of the Victorian era, published in 1867. Admirably, Boston banker Thomas Bulfinch wanted readers without a classical education to know those myths in order to understand the allusions of politicians and preachers to them. He was horrified, though, at the thought that readers might glimpse a naked Aphrodite somewhere, and so, in the words of his obituary, Bulfinch “expurgated…all that would be offensive” from his Mythology.

Edith Hamilton was made of sterner stuff. Born the year Bulfinch’s Mythology was published, she was home-schooled, mastering Latin, Greek, French, and German in childhood. She entered Bryn Mawr College in 1890, earning a bachelor’s degree in Greek and Latin, then taught classics for years while translating Aeschylus and assembling a collection of Plato’s dialogues that is still widely read today.

But it was her own book Mythology that would make her famous—and that would supplant Bulfinch as the standard text it had been for fully 75 years. The story is that an editor invited her to write a popular book on Greek literature, which Hamilton obliged with The Greek Way, published in 1930, when she was 62. Twelve years later, Mythology appeared. When Hamilton died in 1963, it had sold more than 1.8 million copies.

In Hamilton’s Mythology, the Greek gods drop their Bulfinch-ian proprieties, though they don’t quite become the full-throated sociopaths that Robert Graves would present in The Greek Myths (1955). She describes Zeus, rightly, as a deity who “could be opposed and deceived,” though, she notes, Zeus did plenty of deceiving himself to “hide his infidelity from his wife.” Hamilton describes Hera, the offended party, as “Zeus’s wife and sister” (a Chinatown moment avant la lettre), who “chiefly engaged in punishing the many women Zeus fell in love with.” The story of Jason and the Golden Fleece takes on some of the horrific dimensions that Bulfinch elided, with a love-mad Medea, who “had plenty of intelligence,” disposing most unpleasantly of a rival for Jason’s affections—donning a poisoned robe that Medea gave her, the woman “dropped dead; her very flesh had melted away.”

Modern mythographers are more direct still (noting, for instance, that Medea chopped her own children to bits). But Edith Hamilton, a remarkable scholar and fine writer, cleared the path for them, sweeping aside a Parson Weems–ish tradition and letting readers see for themselves just how complex those gods of old were—and why a smart mortal would want to steer very far away from them. Still in print 80 years after its first publication, Mythology is a classic in itself and a pleasure to read.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.