PREFACE This is a book written for the general reader who is interested in evaluating and understanding Western culture.It aims to provide an introduction to the two main sources of Western civilization — Greek mythology and the Bible — and assumes no previous background knowledge of either.Until recently the study of Greek and Roman culture,and of the classical languages of Greek and Latin in particular,was a major feature of western education.Until very recently too,most educated westerners had a fairly extensive knowledge of the Bible,as a result both of their education and of fairly widespread religious observance.So Western writers assumed a quite detailed knowledge of both Greek mythology and the Bible in everything they wrote.A working knowledge of these two very large areas is the…