I have limited my subject today to one facet of classical mythology in America--its evolution from a specialized body of knowledge only for Greek and Latin initiates into a field of general interest open to all who could read English. I have chosen the word "democratize" to describe this process rather than "popularize," because the former includes the latter, and adds an ethical dimension; to democratize means not only to make something popularly available, but to make it work for social equality and against usurpation by power and wealth. I want particularly to investigate the opening-up of mythology's mysteries to people of both sexes who did not go to secondary school and college, and to women in particular--that is, the groups which did not until the nineteenth century have access to classical languages. That people of color, including African-American slaves, are included here goes without saying.

My subject will not include--except in necessary references-the teaching of classical mythology in grammar schools and colleges before 1855, as until just a few decades before that date secondary and higher levels of schooling did not include the groups which I have just mentioned. And I will not trace references to classical mythology in belles lettres, as this field, too, was not open to all--a major reason, in fact, being the copious mythological--and other classical--content. This, in fact, was the very problem which, in 1855, Thomas Bulfinch (1796-1867), a Harvard-educated Bostonian and civic-minded part-time writer, addressed in his book The Age of Fable. "Our book," he declares in his Preface, "is not for the learned, nor for the theologian, nor for the philosopher, but for the reader of English literature, of either sex, who wishes to comprehend the allusions so frequently made by public speakers, lecturers, essayists, and poets, and those which occur in polite conversation." The distinction he is implicitly making is that the myth-mentioning speakers, lecturers, essayists, poets, and the initiators of polite conversation, had studied Greek and Latin. "How," he asks, "is mythology to be taught to one who does not learn it through the medium of the languages of Greece and Rome?" His book was his answer. One of the most popular works ever published in the United States, The Age of Fable, widely known as Bulfinch's Mythology, is still being published today. It was the most important milestone in the democratization of classical mythology in this country. That is why I have chosen its publication date, 1855, as the cutoff for this talk.

To illustrate steps along the way to the democratization effected by Bulfinch, I have drawn examples from a few of the many possible sources of evidence. My examples are, in the order in which I will deal with them: a mythology handbook originally published in Latin in France in 1659, translated into English in 1698, and widely used thereafter; some state seals and coins in seventeenth- and eighteen-century America; from the same period almanacs published in three regions of the country; a collection of objects reflecting popular taste in American, 1800-1840; and the work of two women, one black and one white, the eighteenth-century Phillis Wheatley, and the nineteenth-century Margaret Fuller. These are the questions to which I hope to provide some tentative answers: what were some places in the popular culture where mythological tales and figures were out in the open for all to see, and who were some actual agents who wanted to de-mystify mythology for the Latinless and Greekless.

Before I continue, I would like to draw your attention to your handout, on which I have included both general works in which you may find specifics to which I will refer, and also a few more specialized works which I have found useful. For example, the historical context for mythology in our target period is described and illustrated with abundant examples by Burton Feldman and Robert D. Richardson in their 1972 work The Rise of Modern Mythology, 1680-1860. The authors point to the period as central to the study of mythology in the modern world (they mean the Western world, although they often refer to non-Western mythologies). In the Enlightenment period of the late1600s and early 1700s, among intellectuals the study of mythology was prompted by the growing genre of the travel narrative, which produced myths from various cultures; by skepticism about Christianity against which pagan mythology supplied ammunition; by an interest in history; and by the use of the comparative method in examining cultures. Later, with the Romantic movement beginning to take hold around the middle of the 1700s, a new set of interests among the intelligentsia came to bear upon mythology--its connections with folk literature, and with the archaic and the heroic. All of this intellectual ferment, it goes without saying, gravitated into American thought from Europe where it originated.

At the beginning of the period with which Feldman and Richardson deal--around 1700--the term "myths" still generally referred to Greek and Roman mythology. The study of these stories was decidedly secondary to the study of classical languages and literatures--the major subject in secondary school and college. Mythology was not considered a subject in its own right. However, by 1860, Western intellectuals had grown interested in mythology for its own sake and in myths from many cultures--India, China, Germany, Africa, and the new world. Mythology had became a field unto itself which could illuminate others such as comparative religion. In the minds of many intellectuals, it was no longer a body of knowledge about old stories, but a mode of thought common to all cultures. I enthusiastically recommend to you, if you are not already familiar with it, the twenty-six-page bibliography of historic, critical, and other works on mythology, 1680-1860, at the end of Feldman and Richardson.

Another topic I want to cover briefly before I tell you the results of my recent search for democratizing trends, is the availability of resources for studying classical mythology in American belles lettres in the period under discussion here. Meyer Reinhold in Classica Americana includes in his Selected Bibliography works on the classical element, undoubtedly including much mythology, in Freneau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Thoreau (and there is a recent book from Greenwood Press on classical mythology in Melville alone). Accardi, et al, compilers of Recent Studies in Myths and Literature, 1970-1990, are members of a group at the University of Kansas called the Myth Studies Unit. Their annotated bibliographical lists are for teachers and scholars of British and American literature of all periods, and they include a chapter specifically for classical scholars. Each chapter on a particular national literature focuses on both general works about a period and studies of specific authors in that period. Accardi's chapter on American literature up to 1900 includes listings of works on mythology in Bradstreet, Cooper, Charles Brockden Brown, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Holmes, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, and Whitman--within the period we are dealing with today, as well as works on mythology in Wheatley and Fuller. Irving is not included, but in a recent development, Gregory Staley of the University of Maryland in an unpublished paper, "From Odysseus to Rip Van Winkle: Classical Myth in America," has pointed out Odyssean resemblances in Irving's tale.

Returning now to the theme of this paper--the democratization of classical mythology in America to 1855, I am using here the older definition of mythology which I believe is still the popular one, a traditional body of knowledge about old stories, and the stories to which I refer are those of Greece and Rome. Not only to 1855, but up to a much later date, mythology meant classical mythology in the popular mind. I want to add, though, that that situation is changing rapidly, and it is likely that "mythology" for most schoolchildren today means stories from many cultures.

In Europe in the eighteenth century, according to Feldman and Richardson, in the so-called Age of Reason, there was an outpouring of popular mythologizing; these popularizations were aimed at diverse audiences and influential in beginning to spread ideas about mythology. The popularizing effort included inexpensive handbooks as well as entries in the encyclopedias of the period, including that of Diderot, and the Britannica (first edition, 1771). The era was notable for the spread of classical knowledge, in general. Martin Snyder in an essay in Wiltshire's book summarizes the eighteenth century "centrifugal movement" from Rome, the center of ancient treasures, of "the Icon of Antiquity," as he calls it, to other countries in the West. The excavations taking place in Herculaneum and Pompeii helped to stir up interest in antiquity. In Rome, because of the growing interest in the classical world, impoverished families were selling off their collections of antiquities, and Londoners in particular acquired antiquities for their own collections. By the 1750s, illustrated publications of classical archaeological remains and art began to appear throughout Europe. All of this stimulated interest in mythology--especially evident of course, in classical sculpture. Miranda Marvin, in a recent lecture on the Elgin Marbles explained why Rome rather than Greece was the focal point; until the 1820s the Ottoman Empire ruled Greece and effectively cut it off from Western Europe. Athens was not on the Grand Tour; this gave pride of place to Rome.

An aid for at least some people of the time in deciphering mythological "icons of antiquity" was a widely used mythology handbook, Andrew Tooke's Pantheon. This is a useful backdrop to our subject today because in 1855 when The Age of Fable was published--more than a century and a half after Tooke--the reviewer for The North American Review called Bulfinch's book a "new 'Pantheon.'" This makes it prudent to conclude that Tooke was well known and widely used in at least the circles where The North American Review was read. I have found two references to it in American libraries--one to the 1726 edition (the tenth) in Marcus McCorison's listing of the books in the 1764 catalogue of the Redwood Library Company in Newport, Rhode Island, and one citing 1823 use at the Boston Latin School--this in Pauline Holmes's history of the school. I intend to continue my search for evidence of Tooke in American libraries; even though it was an English publication--first published here in 1825 in an adaptation of the thirty-third edition--the prevalence of English books in early America makes it very likely that it was commonly used, but probably not democratically (that is, including women and children), as I will explain.

Andrew Tooke, Master of the Charterhouse, a famous London public school, translated into English in 1698 the Latin work Pantheum Mysticum written by a French Jesuit Francois Pomey, for the Dauphin, and first published in 1659. The sixth edition of Tooke, published in 1713, is mercifully available in a 1976 reprint published by Garland as part of their multi-volume series The Renaissance and the Gods. Tooke's book was radically different from Bulfinch's in that the prior work was aimed at schools. The English author clearly labels his book on its title page "for the use of schools," obviously meaning grammar schools like his own Charterhouse, where the classical languages were the main curriculum. This is apparent in the abundant quotations from classical authors in both the original languages and translations, in the footnotes throughout the work. The book is written, according to the long version of its title, "in a short, plain and familiar method, by way of dialogue." This device is reminiscent of Corderius's sixteenth-century reader. Corderius's two schoolboys are named A and B; Tooke's characters are different--one a youth named Paleophilus and the older wiser one who answers the questions named Mystagogus--in other words, initiator into the mysteries.

The formula worked; the editor of the Garland series, Stephen Orgel, states that Tooke "was probably the all-time mythographic best seller in English," and by 1771 had gone through twenty-three printings. Incidentally Bulfinch's work has had what is now an equally long life, and has gone through over one hundred editions of various kinds. Tooke's Pantheon has six main sections--four dealing with gods (I'll give an example for each): celestial (Jupiter): terrestrial (Diana); Marine (Neptune); and Infernal (Pluto). The last two sections of the book deal with what Tooke labels Subordinate and Miscellaneous Deities (Lares and Penates), and Adscriptious Gods (that is, ones added to the list)--men whose merit made them divine (Hercules). Tooke tells the stories in lively fashion and includes, as I said, copious footnotes about classical sources for the schoolboys who are his intended audience. He has a good index with quite a bit of extra information beyond mere identification. Like its many counterparts of the Enlightenment period, it was euhemeristic in its outlook--that is, it was based on the view that the gods originated in the deification of historical or biblical heroes--for various human reasons, as Tooke explains, such as the wish to flatter rulers, the drive to immortalize the good, and lack of faith in the true God (for example, Saturn is said to have originated in the person of Noah).

The Mystagogus, it appears, was indoctrinating schoolboys not only in the stories of the classical myths, but also into the presence of sex and violence in life. These elements in the classical sources may partially explain why myths were held to be too raw for women and children. This was part of the problem which Bulfinch addressed, and The North American Review critic makes it clear that he understood it. "We have," he wrote, "we believe for the first time, a 'Pantheon,' which might hold an unchallenged place in the drawing-room [read "parlor"--which I shall come to later, and for "parlor," read also "women's quarters"] or be read with no shock to the moral nature by a child of tender years." That this was a general point of view about The Age of Fable as contrasted with earlier handbooks is support by the contemporary review in the Boston Evening Transcript which states that in Bulfinch's book, "everything has been excluded that would offend good taste. The result is that parents now have an unoffending myth book to give their children." Bulfinch, by the way, had some predecessors--some of them, fascinatingly, women, who bowdlerized as much as he, but his was the milestone work.

One needs only compare the treatment of Jupiter in the two books--Tooke and Bulfinch--to see the difference. Near the start of his book Tooke describes a violent episode--Jupiter's visit to the house of the Acadian Lycaeon where the mortal king, hoping to expose the god as less than the immortal he is claiming to be, serves him a servant-man roasted and boiled. Bulfinch does not include this episode or other stories of cannibalism which Tooke provides. After the tale of Lycaeom in Tooke, Paleophilus asks Mystagogus whether Jupiter had other exploits. Mystagogus replies in the affirmative, but says that "they are very lewd and dishonorable. I am almost ashamed to mention them...I will mention only a few." He then launches into ten instances where Jupiter "debauched," "corrupted," "defiled," "inflamed," "deflower'd" and "abused" (I am quoting only Tooke's verbs) various women, and also how he changed himself into an eagle to carry away "the pretty boy Ganymede."

Bulfinch leaves out several of these stories and in the ones he includes he uses no such inflammatory language, but instead tells soothingly of how Jupiter flirted with Io, how Callisto had captivated him, how in the disguise of a bull he had carried away Europa, and how Castor and Pollux were the offspring of Leda and the Swan "under which disguise Jupiter had concealed himself." For mortals, he uses stronger language at times--for instance, referring to Aegisthus as Clytemnastra's paramour. But in general the raw facts are concealed.

Tooke's Pantheon represents an important step toward democratization of mythology--one which other similar works also demonstrated--in that the stories were told in English and not the classical languages. But the book, with its boisterous sexual references and classical language allusions was for privileged domains--the schoolrooms of secondary schools and colleges attended only by a small number of males, and libraries patronized by or in the homes of graduates of these schools. It was not, as we learn from the critic in The North American Review, intended for the drawing-room or its working class equivalent.

In humbler surroundings, mythology was not presented systematically as something taught by a learned Mystagogus, but rather willy-nilly as an occasional part of life, not really comprehensible to the uninitiated. In early America, intricate stories of classical gods and heroes were needed only by those few acquiring high culture. Other people--women, working class men, children, and people of color--did not need such specific knowledge. However, fleetingly in their daily lives they saw mythological "icons of antiquity." One location for mythological references in the common culture would have been the official seals of a few colonies or states. New Jersey's had images of Liberty and Ceres; New York's, Liberty and Justice who was blindfolded and held sword and scales; North Carolina's, Liberty with a Ceres-like goddess of Plenty; and Virginia's, on one side Virtus dressed as an Amazon with her left foot on a personified Tyranny (thus, "Sic semper tyrannis"), and on the other side, Liberty, Eternity and Ceres (I leave out California's image of Minerva, made official in 1849, as a bit late for this study). I remind you here of Reinhold's call for a comprehensive study of classical symbols and iconography on "seals, banners, diplomas, coins, certificates, monuments," in, for example, items used by the Masonic Order, the Society of Cincinnati, and student societies, as well as the many resources he cites for studies such as these. Tempted by his listings, I turned to one of them, Vermeule's study of American coins, and therein found much information about the mythological background of the figured of a diademed Liberty--drawing from both classical and neoclassical depictions of goddesses. For example, Vermeule traces the image of Liberty on gold $5 and $10 pieces coined in 1838 first to a circa 1800 painting by a contemporary of David, then to a Greco-Roman statue, and then to an Athenian statue of about 420 B.C. Engravings and plaster casts of classical works were more and more available in America at the time. Columbia, a figure similar to Liberty, was also based on classical models. Vermeule gives interesting evidence of Dupre, a French artist who designed medals commemorating American Revolutionary victories, and American independence--one with a Liberty based on classical depictions of Artemis--with streaming hair rather than a chignon or diadem.

Another place in the popular culture where classical myths were occasionally referred to was the almanac, published here and there in the seventeenth century, starting in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1639, becoming more and more ubiquitous in the eighteenth century, and continuing into the nineteenth. Almanacs and the Bible were the common reading matter for Americans literate in English, and this included a large number. "Elegant Literature," as Bulfinch called it when explaining his mission of popularizing mythology to demystify belles lettres, was clearly not part of the reading matter of most literate people in New England, in the seventeenth century. Franklin B. Dexter in his article describe the occasional list of books drawn from inventories of possessions filed in Probate Courts in New England. Most did not include books at all, or if they did, referred to them only in the aggregate--"books." If specified, they were most often the Bible in various editions, and in the next place Psalm books. Classical works appeared on some lists--in the ancient languages, or study aids for these; and little was found of literary works in English where one might find references to classical mythology. Exceptions are famous translations--Sandy's Metamorphoses and Chapman's Homer. For comparison's sake, Dexter investigated two Virginia inventories of the period, and found more works of belles lettres there. In New England, he concludes, "the early settlers and their children lived without the inspiration of literature."

But almanacs helped fill the gap, carrying as they sometimes did, literary efforts which, though definitely not belles lettres, showed imagination. We are speaking here of small quantities of writing, as the almanacs were, of course, published only once a year, and at the beginning were thin volumes. Over the years they expanded. Almanacs were the forerunners of modern magazines and city directories, served as calendars, helped publicize the texts of government documents such as the Declaration of Independence, contained discussions of politics and religion, remedies for ills of human beings, animals, and plants, travel directions, and--as I mentioned--some popular literature, stories, poems, and humorous tales. As time went by, almanacs expanded to 24-48 pages. They were indispensable for farmers, fisherman, and sailors, because of their astronomical information. Printers depended on them for yearly boosts in income. Apparently, however, everyone who could read, read them. Poor Richard's Almanac starting in 1732 is probably the best known, but was only one of many. In looking for references to classical mythology in almanacs, I have surveyed two eighteenth-century sequences--one, of The New Jersey Almanack and the other, of the South Carolina/Georgia Almanack. I wanted a regional spread. Before I share the results of this search, I want first to refer you to Gummere's 1955 article, "The Classical Element in Early New England Almanacs." The complete reference is in his book. The high degree of literacy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony made for much reading aloud in the home, and almanacs , in Gummere's words, "reigned supreme." He explains, in classically relevant terms the ancient ancestry of almanacs, how they originated in the ancient Middle East, are echoed in such works as Ovid's Fasti and Manilius's Astronomica (first printed in 1472 and much more important in early America than it is now), and then reappeared in English seventeenth-century versions (almanacs were an international publishing phenomenon, by the way). The so-called "Man of the Signs," with Zodiac symbols illustrated by parts of the human body, and older than Manilius who uses the concept, is included in the eighteenth-century American almanacs which I have examined. Gummere surveyed two series of Massachusetts almanacs--one edited chiefly by Harvard graduates, and the other by members of the Ames family of Dedham. Milton Drake, who has listed all American almanacs of which there were discernible records, tells how popular the Ames almanacs were--they averaged a sale of 60,000 annually when the total national population was not quite 2,000,000. In the Massachusetts almanacs explored by Gummere, mythological personae--the rain as Pluvius, the sun as Apollo, the March wind as Aeolus, December as the month of Boreas, and nymphs on all sides--abound. A 1656 almanac refers in verse to "The loving Twins, by Leda born," and 1730 Ames Almanac, to "Smooth-faced Thetis." Other mythological figures whom Gummere found mentioned are Pomona, Minerva, Ceres, Phoebe, and Chiron. The public had some negative reactions, he found, to the use of "Idolatrous Appellations" and "Heathenish Language." The result was a compromise in the almanacs, with editors trying to reconcile pagan and Christian points of view. My own favorite mythological reference from the Ames Almanacs, which I located in a search of these volumes some time ago, is a 1740 couplet about Boston itself, one with which, as a native of the city, I agree: "Ye Gods, in Rome what have ye more to do?/Elysium in New England waits for you." Gummere ends his study of the classical element in early almanacs by concluding that "culturally the classics ran a respectable second to the Scriptural influence."

The survey which I recently made--of two sets of eighteenth-century almanacs outside of New England--yielded less frequent references to classical myths than Gummere found in his New England-centered search. The first group I examined were issues of the New Jersey Almanack, which were published variously in Philadelphia and Trenton between 1745 and 1784. In the microfiche collection of Early American Imprints, where these are to be found, some issues are missing and designated simply by references to their existence (typically, from advertisements of the time). I examined all copies available on microfiche for the years I mentioned, and they totaled sixteen. Out of these, six contained mythological material. In the 1746 issue are various references to Bacchanalians and Bacchanals, for example: "When Western Clouds involv'd the God of Light/And all the Eastern starry orbs look'd bright/When Sots their tavern Bacchanals began,/ And Thetis at a draught drank up the Son/ Whilst Luna with her Silver Hornes drew near." In 1747, a poem for April (some almanacs had literary works interspersed with the entries for the months) addresses those associated with an oracle as "ye worthy sons of great Apollo." Verses for September have a woman saying that like her lover she "has felt the power of Mr. Cupid." The 1780 issue has a story of a storm-beset traveler praying to Jupiter, and in 1781 Dryden is quoted in a passage about Jupiter's calling gold a greater god than he. In a 1782 poem, a long-lived person is described as "he that outlives Nestor," and in 1784 the September-December literary entries contain not original work, but some of Alexander Pope's "Temple of Fame," with, as one would expect, references to mythology.

The other group I surveyed were those in a series called The South Carolina/Georgia Almanacks, published in Charleston. I examined fifteen of these from the period 1765-1784 (again, some were missing, but their existence testified to by entries). In these issues I found three which contained references to classical mythology. In 1768 in an essay "On Vulgar Errors," Medea is used to illustrate the point that there is no such thing as an old woman, as all women have the same complexion: "Medea is said to have renewed the youth and vigor of her father Aeson by boiling him with certain magick herbs in a cauldron; but I will not presume to say that our ladies are preserved from old age by stewing in a copper...youth, as well as beauty, is the perpetual prerogative of the female sex." In 1774, a poem from earlier in the century--one which I recall as well known, by the eighteenth-century idealist philosopher George Berkeley is quoted, with lines referring to the Muse who waits in the New World, others referring to another Golden Age, and a final stanza with the line "Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way." The 1777 issue of this southern almanac carried a long patriotic poem about an American victory over a British fleet in a southern port: "Hail, smiling Liberty, celestial Maid/ At thy fair Shrine our ardent Vows are paid/...The bold Actaeon [a British ship's name evidently] dash'd on dangerous Sands,/ Bursts in flames by her own Sailors Hands;/ Actaeon thus, as ancient Fables tell,/ By his own Hounds pursu'd, expired and fell."

From this search through thirty-one issues of two mid-eighteenth-century almanacs in two parts of the country, I have come to the preliminary conclusion that classical mythology occupied a place far down on the list of what was important to almanac readers--things like farming, politics, roads from here to there, dates for court sessions, and remedies--in other words, practical advice. Yet the myths pop up here and there and are a presence of sorts.

To look back for a moment at various pieces of evidence for democratization of classical mythology, there, is first of all, Tooke in the late-seventeenth-century translation into English of the mid-seventeenth-century Pantheum Mysticum. The English schoolmaster thereby created what was, according to Feldman and Richardson, the standard English mythology reference for his time. The work was obviously intended for those educated in the classical languages and literatures from which it quotes extensively in either English or Latin. Still, Tooke made the narrative material available in English. In wanting to give young students of classical languages a short cut to mythological knowledge he was a herald of democratization. For more in the public eye were colonial and early Federal-era coins and seals bearing images from the myths. The same is true of the presence of Jupiter, Thetis, Medea, et al in the almanac pages, along with the Declaration of Independence, schedules of Quaker meetings, and home remedies.

In turning now to Phillis Wheatley, 1753-1784, whose book of poems was published in 1773, we are dealing with an anomaly--as is the case with Margaret Fuller, to whose work I will refer later. Only the fact that each woman was a genius, a fabulous auto-didact, enabled her to master this material generally assigned to men. This is especially true in the case of Wheatley because she was black. She was the first black American whose work was published in book form. The work Poems on Various Subjects, Religious, and Moral, made her not only nationally, but internationally, famous. Many people doubted that she--a slave who had been captured in Africa and brought to America--at about eight years of age--was the real author, but her work was attested to by several of Boston's most learned and prominent men. Publication was a problem here, however, and the book was published in England. Her Boston master, John Wheatley, explains in an introduction to her book how quickly she learned English, mastered writing, was able to read the Bible, and made some progress in Latin. Her published poems, thirty-eight in all, are reflections on various deaths, prayers for friends' safe voyages, thoughts on her own origins, hymns to the morning and evening, and various other subjects. Written chiefly in the heroic couplets of the English Augustan Age, they are full of mythological references. Shields, her recent editor, in an earlier essay cites Wheatley's frequent use of certain characters--Aurora eight times; Apollo by that name, seven; and by the name of Phoebus, twelve times. The Muse or the Muses, I observed, are also favorites. Other figures she mentions--these in her poems praying for safe voyages or giving thanks for those completed--are Neptune, Boreas, Nereids, and Aeolus. The first work in her book typifies her use of myth--she cites Homer and Vergil with references to their work, and says of her Maecenas, to whom it is addressed, that in contrast to her his "whole bosom is the Muses' home;/ When they form tow-ring Helicon retire,/ They fan in you the bright immortal fire." She goes on to say that she is not as inspired as that, and then refers to Terence--why was he the "one alone of Afric's race" to be gifted by the Muses, she asks. In her final stanze she evokes a throng of mythical figures--Naiads, Phoebus, and her favorite, "bright Aurora." Shields gives special attention to Wheatley's translation of the Niobe story, from Book VI of the Metamorphoses, and suggests that her interest in this passage may have stemmed from the moral to the tale pointed out by George Sandys in the essay accompanying his translation of this book. The English Sandys, as you will recall, completed his translation of Ovid's work while an official of the Crown in Virginia; it was published for the first time in 1626, and was the earliest English verse written in America, as well as a successful translation. Sandys sees the fall from glory and transformation into stone of Niobe and her children as the natural result of her ancestry as the child of Tantalus and Taygeta--Avarice and Riches. Shields believes this moral would have appealed to Wheatley who had become a devout Christian. In the story of classical mythology's evolution from a specialized body of knowledge only for Greek and Latin initiates into a field of general interest open to all who could read English, Phillis Wheatley has a place, because in spite of not having the traditional qualifications of whiteness, maleness, and higher-than-ordinary social rank, she claimed the material of the myths as her own to use in her poetry.

With Wheatley, we enter a significantly different physical domain. Tooke would have been found in the schoolroom or the library. Coins and state seals were public property in places of business and government. Almanacs one pictures in commercial rooms and in kitchens, or the all-purpose rooms of early American houses. Wheatley's poems bring us into the parlor, a room where she--invited into homes as she was by some cultured Bostonians--would have felt at home.

Americans tried, as Richard L. Bushman puts it to "reconcile their commitment to aristocratic gentility with their devotion to republican equality." The parlor was a salient example of this contradictory behavior. Imitations of rooms of royalty and the aristocracy, in ordinary homes they were often uncomfortable and in many cases used only rarely. They were conceived of as rooms for light refreshments, music, games of cards, and most of all, conversation. In the nineteenth century, says Bushman, the presence of such a room "was a testament of the family's refinement, proof that they understood how to be polite, that...they could appear as polished beings, capable of grace, dignity, and propriety." By the middle of the nineteenth century, although not all homes had parlors, almost all architectural books included them in home design. Decoration could be elaborate. The furnishings, Bushman tells us, "stood for repose, polish, economically useless knowledge, beauty, and decorative activity." The spread of the parlor was, says Bushman, "one of the great democratic movements of the nineteenth century." By creating parlors, people "implicitly claimed the right to live like rulers."

The functions of the parlor--its witness to refinement, its lifting up of the ordinary into a higher sphere, its symbolic value--were similar to the functions of classical mythology as it, too, became democratized in the nineteenth century. Like the parlor, mythology--as well as the classics in their entirety--had belonged to the aristocracy or at the very least, the privileged. In Bulfinch's book--to go ahead of our story a bit--mythology became a republican prerogative. He did not write the book for schools use, but--and he makes this very clear--for the parlor. In fact, he calls his work, with its mixture of instruction and entertainment, "a classical dictionary for the parlor." In the myths and in the 188 myth-related quotations from English and American poets which accompany Bulfinch's myth narratives, one may discern three main functions for the material: to create certain affects, most commonly awe or sensuous delight; to raise discourse to a level more refined than that of ordinary speech; and to supply a common store of images to animate abstractions. Chapter Two of my book contains an analysis of this and other aspects ofThe Age of Fable. One other point: knowing the myths would help a non-classically trained person to understand literature better--and this was Bulfinch's primary aim. However, what drew people in the first place to the ancient classical material had much in common with that which drew them to set aside and furnish rooms as parlors, a movement among the many to enjoy pleasures and richness formerly reserved for the few.

A recent exhibition, Classical Taste in America 1800-1840 includes many objects--most of them suitable for the parlor--with mythology as the decorative theme. Wendy A. Cooper who coordinated the exhibition, is author of the catalogue, for which Richard Bushman wrote an introduction. The show was first shown in Baltimore, is now in Charlotte, North Carolina, and will go on to Houston next spring. I can name only a few of the objects, but urge you to look at the catalogue for a feast of classically based decor. To wealthy homes from France, Italy, and England came such items as cupid-adorned urns, wallpaper with a theme of harvest goddesses, an ormolu clock with a figure of Minerva, and Greek vases painted with scenes probably of the Trojan War. As improved manufacturing methods and transportation made mass production and distribution possible, less costly goods than these, many of them bearing mythological motifs, began to turn up in middle class parlors. For example, in the exhibition are an 1832 cast iron stove decorated with urns and cupids and a bandbox covered with paper showing griffin-drawn chariots. While in the early nineteenth century, needlework renderings of Telemachus and Mentor, and Hector and Andromache, decorated homes, later, with increased availability of mass-produced work, printed copies of engravings hung in parlors. The main classical element in the show is, of course, form-the shapes of pieces of furniture and decorative objects, but mythology is a strikingly apparent theme.

Earlier, in summarizing Feldman and Richardson's historical treatment of mythology, I mentioned how the field had evolved from 1700 when it was viewed by the intelligentsia as a collection of old stories, to 1860 by which time, thinkers, first in Europe--especially Germany--and later in the United States, had arrived at a more profound view of myth as a mode of thought common to all cultures. But in manuals like Tooke's, in iconography public and private, in mythological references both in literature like the rougher type in the almanacs or the more elite like Wheatley's poems, the stories from the myths were still what mainly counted. They were what Bulfinch, too, sensing a need, wanted to give to readers who could not understand myth references in Milton, Byron, Thomas Moore, and other poets, honored at the time, form whose work he quoted.

His audience may have been more interested in mythology than they otherwise would have been because of the work several years before of another Bostonian, Margaret Fuller, who represented not the story-telling aspect of myth, but the more philosophical approach to it. Fuller, 1810-1850, who lived the equivalent of several lives in her forty years, is the subject of a new biography by Charles Capper which gives her to us as a whole woman. There is time today only to address Fuller's fascination with classical mythology and her highly original use of it to help women assume a more equal role in society. Beside Capper, I have used an essay by Richardson, co-author of The Rise of Modern Mythology, "Margaret Fuller and Myth." Fuller, trained early in Latin--unusual for a girl at the time--by her father, who thought this would help the precocious child to advance more quickly, became familiar when still quite young with Ovid. Capper quotes her statement in a letter, written later, saying that in fact she attributed her youthful lack of interest in Christianity to the contrast she saw between the Bible and the myths in Vergil and Ovid. The classical stories were, she said, "full of sparkling deeds and brilliant sayings, and their gods and goddesses, the types of beauty and power with the dazzling veil of flowery language and poetical imagery cast over their vices and failings." Fuller's career--typical for a woman still today in its lack of continuity--proceeded from sporadic teaching efforts outside her original family home (where she was competent at all kinds of work, including sewing clothes for the family and tutoring several younger brothers in Latin and other subjects) to regular school-teaching in Providence (later--but after the events I will now relate--she was, of course, editor of The Dial and a reporter in Italy).

Throughout his account--and the first volume ends with her assuming the editorship of The Dial--Capper deals fully not only with the outward events of Fuller's life, but those of her intellectual life--especially her reading. This included many of the German writers on myth mentioned in Feldman and Richardson, the German Romantic "writers" from Goethe to Novalis, and scholars such as Wincklemann, Heeren, and especially Creuzer.

In 1839, back in Boston from Providence, she was asked by Bronson Alcott to gather a group of women for a series of "Conversations." She consented, and chose as the topic for her first series (and later for her third series) the subject she had learned to love in her study of Ovid, and to think deeply about in her reading of European writers and scholars--classical mythology. The Boston to which she moved in 1839 was awash in mythological iconography. The Athenaeum had a collection of classical casts and some newly acquired books of engravings of classical works of art. An enormously popular exhibition of Washington Allston's neoclassical paintings opened in Boston in the spring and ran for two and a half months. Fuller visited both the Athenaeum and the Allston show many times. Besides all this, her friend Sam Ward had just returned from Europe with a portfolio of copies of Renaissance masterpieces.

Fuller decided to try out Alcott's idea, in part as a way to make a living (she needed to plan for the rent of her family's home in Jamaica Plain, and one brother was entering Harvard, and another almost ready to do so). Too, she was deeply interested in women's education. Although in the 1820s and 1830s, some progress had been made in this regard, the establishment of female academies for instance, by the end of the 1830s the earlier ideal was fading. Immigrant and working-class girls had no part in it; the more privileged girls who did go to school were often getting a superficial, ornamental education. College (some early teacher-training institutions were starting up, but were not on a par with colleges) was not an option. There were in the Boston Unitarian world of which Fuller was a part two groups who might respond to her invitation--young single women who had no clear-cut societal role (in that society one could be only a mother or a teacher) or older married women with some education who wanted to expand their roles beyond those of wife and mother. The series of "Conversations" ultimately stretched over five years (there were, I believe two series a year). Men attended some of these, but by and large they were for women. The common denominator, it turns out, was connection to the various social reform movements of the time, such as abolitionism. Not necessarily rich women, these were, however, well educated and interested in literature and thought. They were not the immigrant and work-class girls who did not receive much education at the time. This was still an early stage in women's struggle for equality; for example, in general, women were excluded from the lecture platform.

The first set of conversations started on Wednesday, November 6, 1939, in, appropriately, a parlor--specifically, the front parlor of Elizabeth Peabody's home and soon-to-be-bookstore, at 13 West Street. Twenty-five women who had each paid $10 for the thirteen week session took part. Fuller's income over the next five years averaged $500 per year (for two series of "Conversations" annually)--about two-thirds of Emerson's proceeds for an equivalent number of lectures. Eventually the "Conversations" attracted over two hundred women. Art and other topics were included; classical mythology was the topic for two of the series (see Margaret and Her Friends by Caroline Healey Dall for a record of the third series in which this was the case).

Fuller aspired to change women's way of thinking, which had been constricted by social mores. She wanted to present various "departments" of thought, classical mythology being one of these, and relate them one to another; and also to help these women define what she called the "object of thought"--how in their own lives they could build a "life of thought upon the life of action"--in other words, make thought and action interdependent (an Emersonian concept). Men, she said, are expected to reproduce what they learn, and women only to display it. The Transcendentalist point of view which she espoused was that intellectual and/or aesthetic work were as vital as--and more satisfying than--business or politics. An ideal life for some people would be intellectual or creative activity separated from institutions, and based on one's own self-reliant creativity. This process could be advanced in certain women by the "Conversations," in which subjective truths would spring forth which would help these participating to find their own paths. She would lead, but not as a lecturer--rather as one calling out the thoughts of the other women--so that, like men, they would reproduce their learning. The record of the "Conversations" is somewhat sparse, but between Elizabeth Peabody's notes of some of them, and Dall's book, at least a partial picture emerges. Fuller's reasons for choosing mythology as her first topic were these: it was a serious, yet playful, objective, and tangible, subject; it was separate from local concerns; was associated with ideas of art, and the myths, she believed, were not prefigurations of Christianity, but more importantly, "symbols of a deep...intellectual and aesthetic life." Fuller did not read Greek, but used excellent sources in translation and primed her group with essays by well-educated members and her own carefully thought out questions. Where the group members themselves learned their myths is a question I have asked myself, and hope to explore. I assume that some or most of them--privileged women as they were--had studied some Latin in academies. And handbooks were available--Tooke, of course, but probably more accessible and proper, some published in the United States beginning, as far as I can determine, in 1810.

In the "Conversations," after introductory sessions, Fuller shifted to her main theme--the individual gods and goddesses as personifications of great instincts and desires--for example, Prometheus as Pure Reason, Minerva as Intellectual Power and Practical Reason, and Jupiter as Creative Energy. Richardson in his article emphasizes that Fuller did not use the myths for historical purposes, for their antiquarian interest, or for their use as literary ornaments. Rather, she used them as material with what Richardson calls "practical Plutarchian consequences for the actual conduct of life." Men and women could become like gods and goddesses. He describes Fuller's use of myth in her 1845 book Woman in the Nineteenth Century, in which she most often uses as examples of spiritually developed females the characters from mythology--Ceres, Proserpine, Cassandra, Antigone, and the Muses, for example. He sees as significant her argument that the idea of woman was best expressed in the myths, and says that she lived as well as imagined "the radical potential of myth."

Capper cites Fuller's "Conversations" as pivotal in the growth of organized American feminism, and her emphasis on the development of the individual woman apart from institutions as the spark for what he calls "the countercultural tradition in American women's culture."

Richardson admires Fuller and disdains Bulfinch, calling his work in The Age of Fable an "influential trivialization." I submit that Richardson does not understand Bulfinch. His work, as well as that of Fuller, should be judged by his objective and the audience at which he was aiming. Just as Fuller had taken it upon herself to use mythology to raise to a higher level of thinking the upper class women in her groups, so Bulfinch undertook to use mythology to help the population at large not to reflect about the philosophical meanings of the myths, but simply to learn and use the stories, so that working people, and women at home who had completed only primary school, for example, could finally understand the references in literature and art toward which many of them yearned. He was a true Mystagogus, a guide to the mysteries for the mass of people who did not know Greek and Latin, and probably never would. Mythology, as I have tried to demonstrate, was a thread traceable throughout the culture up to 1855. Tooke and others had taken the ancient stories and put them into English. Women like Wheatley and Fuller made it clear that these stories could belong to women as well as men. But it remained to Bulfinch to finally democratize classical mythology for Americans not only in 1855, but for more than a century after that.