This is my first sampling of Dawkins' work. I'm only about sixty pages in and I am enjoying it a lot so far. 

Graves takes an usual tack. He first tells each myth in a pretty bare bones manner. He then attempts to explain how the myth came about -- a sort of truth behind the myth. This is in itself quite confusing (he often bangs on about the various goddesses just being different aspects of the one Goddess and various characters representing sacrificial kings of different cults), but the disparate elements start to make some kind of sense after a while. How he is all quite so sure about it, I don't know, but it's interesting (he often declares the mythographer as having mistakenly misinterpreted an icon in a temple), especially how the many myths seem to revolve around only a few themes (often a king being torn apart after a reign of twelve months).

Some of it is almost cartoonishly grisly as well. Atreus serves up his nephews to their father and his brother (and rival) Thyestes in a stew. Then has him banished for eating kids (a very common theme is two competing rulers of the same kingdom). 

Another tale from the same family has Tantalus (Atreus' grandad) serves up Pelops (Atreus' dad) in a stew to the Olympian gods. The gods see it coming and are disgusted, apart from Demeter, who is distracted because of worry over her daughter Persephone down in Tartarus, and absently consumes Pelops' shoulder. The gods decide to put Pelops back together again, but Hephaestus has to make him a new shoulder. Pelops went on to found a chariot race in honour of the gods and from this we get the Olympian Games. It's fun for all the family.

 

It includes 16 poems, four stories and three texts of broadcasts. Thomas had a brilliant knack for creating evocative imagery with terms that seem brand new each time you read them.