The Library (Bibliotheca)

The Library is a primary Greek mythographic handbook, transmitted under Apollodorus's name though modern scholarship holds it was not actually written by the second-century BCE scholar Apollodorus of Athens, a distinction this record states rather than repeating the traditional attribution as settled fact. As a primary text it is authoritative for what this handbook itself records as the standard summary of a given Greek myth, checkable against the text, not for a settled account of its true authorship or precise date of composition, which remains debated. Use it to establish the content of a specific myth as this handbook summarizes it; a claim resting on a divergent or fuller literary telling of the same myth needs a dedicated primary source such as Ovid's Metamorphoses addressed alongside it.