A Note on this Translation

This is a translation of the first volume of Friedrich Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen, in its first edition (Leipzig and Darmstadt: Karl Wilhelm Leske, 1810). It is made from the copy in the Heidelberg University Library. English readers have hitherto known it chiefly by reputation, through J.-D. Guigniaut’s free French adaptation, Religions de l’antiquité, and through the selections in Feldman and Richardson’s The Rise of Modern Mythology (1972).

The pages of the edition of 1810 are marked in the text, so that any passage may be found again in the German.

Creuzer’s own notes keep his numbering. Those of Book One run continuously from 1 to 351. With Book Two Creuzer began his numbering afresh, both of the sections and of the notes. Both are kept as printed, and a note in the second series is cited as, for example, “Book Two, n. 20.” His numbering is kept even where it is faulty: §. 40 is printed twice, note 140 is printed twice, and Book One has no §. 47.

The translator’s notes are few and short, and are kept separate from Creuzer’s. They record misprints, supply references that Creuzer leaves unnamed, and question citations that cannot be right as printed. The misprints themselves are kept in the text.

Greek is given as Creuzer printed it, in modern accentuation, with an English rendering in square brackets after quotations and key terms. Latin quotations are treated in the same way. Creuzer quotes Homer in the German verse of J. H. Voss, and those lines are rendered here from Voss rather than freshly from the Greek, because Creuzer’s argument sometimes turns on Voss’s wording.

Chapter Five of Book One, and the first two chapters of Book Two, are written as lecture outlines: the Entwurf of the title page’s “Lectures and Sketches.” In them Creuzer sets down headings and topics in clipped, verbless phrases, which he meant to fill out from the chair, with the evidence in the notes. The translation keeps that telegraphic form rather than smoothing it into continuous prose. The other chapters are continuous prose.

The seven copperplates are not reproduced, but their contents are described in Creuzer’s list of illustrations at the end of the volume. A glossary of the renderings adopted for Creuzer’s key terms follows it.

D. M.