The inspiring adventures and stirring deeds of three of the greatest heroes of mythology spring to vivid life in these pages. Charles Kingsley, author of
The Water-Babies
and one of the Victorian age's most brilliant storytellers, recounts for young readers the legendary feats of Perseus, Jason, and Theseus.
Rash and angry in his vow to slay Medusa the Gorgon, Perseus is cunning and patient in his quest. With the help of Athené's shield and Hermes' winged sandals, he faces the creature with writhing snakes for hair and rescues a princess chained to a rock. Fifty brave men known as the Argonauts join Jason in a treacherous journey across stormy, monster-infested seas in the search for the golden fleece of a magical ram. And Theseus sails off to Crete aboard a black-sailed ship with seven maidens and seven youths, all of them intended as sacrifices to the Minotaur—a fiend with the body of a man, the head of a bull, and the deadly teeth of a lion.
"There are no fairy tales like these old Greek ones," Kingsley notes, "for beauty, and wisdom, and truth, and for making children love noble deeds . . . for each of us has a Golden Fleece to seek, and a wild sea to sail over ere we reach it, and dragons to fight ere it be ours." This edition of his retellings of the immortal tales features sixty imaginative illustrations.