The author never forgets he is a scholar, and never allows us to forget that he is a wit and a humorist. Let us pretend that the phrase has never been used before, and therefore declare because we mean it: This book will please children of all ages from ten to eighty. The heard-for-the-first-time, or the familiar stories of Greek mythology are told as parts of a connected whole; this book is The Rise and Fall of the Olympian Empire. The Greeks had a clear conception of the family histories of their gods, godesses and demi-gods; here it is, complete with a family tree, and the stories remembered by celestial or earthly Nannies when their charges had grown up and become celebrated.