Mythology in literature

As Christianity swept through Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, the religion that empire had sustained slowly devolved into myth. However, the works produced during the height of the Roman empire, such as Ovid's Metamorphoses and Virgil's Aeneid continued to be read, and eventually provided a context for later writers to reference in contemporary writings. The Roman gods served as a useful counterpoint to the Christian God, and the pantheon of Olympians came to represent either different facets of God, the Virgin Mary, as a means of allegory, or to contrast the political situation with a heavenly one.

It is important to realize that for many years, until the 16th and 17th centuries, the works of Homer were largely unknown, and therefore unstudied, and unreferenced.

List of works that reference mythology

• Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
• Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyda[?]
• Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene
• Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander
• William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida[?]
• John Milton, Paradise Lost
• Alfred Tennyson, Ulysses[?]
• T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
• James Joyce, Ulysses

See also: Greek mythology, Roman mythology, epic poem, mythology in art[?]