Note : in this account, several stories, from several different sources, including Bulfinch's mythology, are combined, with a few small interpolations of my own, patching in the gaps in the story in a way that seem to me to be suggested by the source material. This one is still under construction and quite open to revision, but this is what we have so far.

If the prose seems to be a little bit purple, please bear with us. Remember, this started out as a revision of what others had written, Bulfinch especially, and much of Bulfinch's style still carries through. When we come back from break, a few re-tellings later, a more adult, less Harlequin like style should start emerging. In the meanwhile ... think of it as folklore, and please be patient - as you can see in the attached article, there are philosophical and religious reasons for us to do these revisions slowly and conservatively. As we might say in the context of that article, we don't want to turn the myth back into a story; we don't want our own individual voices to drown out that of the process by which myths are born and develop, seperating ourselves in spirit from that living reality which helps us connect to that which we revere, in our haste.

This should not be thought of as an authoritative, or authentic version, given the modern intrusion, but merely as our idea of what the story might have been, had more than scraps of the old traditions survived the Middle Ages, and the mythic tradition continued. One should remember that the source material, of which most have been lost, did not tell the stories so much as make references to them, either in commentary, or poetic allusions, and it is left to us to extract the narrative from this.

Let us be clear, though, that this is the effort of an interested amateur, not a trained classicist. Some questions I would ask and don't know enough to answer as I borrow details from the various versions of the myth, is what the geneological relationship between the sources is, one might say. When and where did they originate? Which author is likely to have been familiar with the work of which, or is likely to have been immersed in a mythic tradition growing out of that of the time and place of his predecessor? How conservative was the tradition (are the differing sets of details fragments of an older, richer tradition, or later fabrications, possibly even borrowed from wholly unrelated sources)? Eventually, I hope to be able to answer these questions, and this version of the story may end up nothing more than a curiosity linked to from the file replacing it. Today, though, here is a somewhat educated guess, as to what the story might have been.