I read this book as a nine year old, and it has certainly influenced my life. I no longer own it, and it has probably not been in my library for forty years. But my memory remains. My best friend and I at the time really got into Roman and Greek mythology. This was the book I read and my friend read a general intro to Romn & Greek mythology. So, we started playing together taking the role of one of the gods. We determined we needed a third boy to successfully play, and recruited someone else. When he showed up we rode bikes and fought each other with sticks. The three gods we played were Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto, three brothers, and we rotated the roles. Sometimes, a fourth boy would come and then we would add Apollo to the rota.

I decided to search Long Island libraries for the book I read 63 years ago, and found this book that seemed to fit the bill. I then read the preface and found this sentence: "To the Greeks, the sky, the sea, and the earth were divided up between the three divine brothers, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades." I realized this was the sentence that prompted our choice of gods, even though we decided that we should use the Roman and not the Greek names. I now remember our discussion: that the Roman names were better known. Further on in the preface, the fourth one mentioned was Hera whom we could not relate to and hoped we would never have a mother like her. But the fifth mention was Apollo, the Sun god of art and learning, and there was our optional fourth participant.

The stories of the Odyssey still ring with me, particularly Scylla and Charybdis, the Land of Hades, the Cyclops, the almost vain search of Telemachus for his father, and the problem of Penelope with her suitors. ( )

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