Name the source in the sentence
If we say Homer describes something, we say which poem and roughly where in it, so you can check us.
Home/About
The project
About Thelmoros
Thelmoros is a small independent publisher of free reading guides to Greek mythology, working out of Kelburn in Wellington. This page explains where the project came from, how a guide is checked before it goes up, what we refuse to do, and who pays for it.
2017
First guides published
6
Guide collections
0
Adverts or trackers
Where this came from
It began as a reading group that kept getting stuck
In 2016 a handful of Wellington readers began meeting on Thursday evenings to work through the Iliad in translation, a book a fortnight. Nobody was teaching; everybody was reading.
The poem was fine. The background was not. Every few weeks the conversation stalled on the same small set of confusions, and the quickest answers we could find usually made things worse: confident, unsourced, and often borrowed from a Victorian retelling.
- Greek or Roman? Zeus and Jupiter, Herakles and Hercules are paired but not identical, and a Roman poet writing centuries later is no witness to early Greek belief.
- Early or late? Homer and Hesiod sit at the start of the written tradition; Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca is a much later compilation. Both are useful, only one is early.
- Which version is the version? The Theogony and the Iliad describe the same gods differently. Neither is “the myth”; both are evidence.
- Where did that detail come from? A surprising share of the most memorable details in popular retellings are not attested in any ancient text at all.
One of us began typing up a page after each session: who said what, when they wrote, and which claim rested on which text. By the middle of 2017 there were enough of those pages to be worth sharing, so we put them online under an invented name and kept going. The method has not changed: read the myth, then read the source.
Scope
What we publish, and what we deliberately do not
The catalogue is short and all of it is free: six collections of short guides, a set of longer reading notes, a list of source passages attached to every guide, and discussion questions with no answer key. No account, no paywall, no membership tier a few pages in.
The other half matters just as much, because a tidy education site is easy to mistake for an institution.
- We are not a university. Thelmoros is a publisher. It awards nothing, is accredited by nobody, and is attached to no tertiary institution.
- We do not mark work. We will not grade an essay, moderate an assignment, or tell a student what a particular marker wants to see.
- We do not sell degrees or certificates. There is nothing here to enrol in and no credential of any kind on offer.
- We do not write anyone’s essay. We will gladly point you at the passage and explain what is in dispute. The argument has to be yours.
What we will do is answer a question about a source, say where a story is first attested, and tell you when the honest answer is that nobody knows.
Editorial method
How a guide gets written
Four steps, in this order, every time. The last one is why the schedule is slow, and why we are willing to stand behind the rest.
-
1
Choose an episode
We write one episode at a time rather than one god at a time — the division of the cosmos by lot, not “Zeus”. What gets chosen comes from the inbox: the question a teacher and two readers all ask in one month becomes the next guide.
-
2
Read the primary sources
Before anything is drafted, the writer reads every ancient text we can find that attests the episode and lists them in rough date order: Homer, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, Pindar, the tragedians, then later compilers such as Apollodorus and Roman-era poets such as Ovid. Late sources belong in the list, labelled as late.
-
3
Write the plain summary
A few hundred words of plain English: no invented dialogue, no smoothing over the strange parts, and no quietly picking a winner where the sources disagree. Where the evidence is thin, the guide says so in the sentence rather than in a note nobody reads.
-
4
Have it checked before publishing
Nobody publishes their own draft. A second reader goes through the text against the source list, checks every claim attributed to a named work, and can send the whole guide back. Only after that does it go up.
Principles
Six rules we hold ourselves to
Label late material as late
Roman-era retellings belong in a guide, provided the reader can see they arrived centuries after the earliest version.
Leave the contradictions standing
Where two ancient texts disagree we give both, then explain what each gains by telling it that way.
Plain English, not simplified myth
We cut the jargon, never the difficulty. Ancient myth is strange, and the strangeness is usually the point.
Free, and free of advertising
No paywall, no account, no adverts, no sponsored guides and no analytics watching you read.
Say plainly when we do not know
Some questions have no surviving answer. “We do not know” is more useful than a confident guess.
Corrections
How we handle mistakes
We make them. Over nine years we have muddled two versions of a family tree, attributed a scene to the wrong poem, and described a Roman detail as though it were early Greek. The question is not whether a small editorial team gets things wrong. It is what happens next.
Corrections are made in public. When a change alters the meaning of a guide, a dated note goes at the foot of that page saying what the guide used to claim and what it claims now. We do not quietly rewrite a paragraph and let the old version vanish, because a reader who took notes from the earlier text deserves to know what moved. Typographical slips we simply fix.
What a correction note looks like
Corrected 3 June 2026: this guide previously called the Horae daughters of Zeus and Hera. Hesiod’s Theogony makes them daughters of Zeus and Themis. The sentence has been amended and the source added to the list below.
If you find an error, the contact form carries a subject line for exactly that purpose. Reports of mistakes go to the front of the queue, and we reply whether or not we end up agreeing. If a claim turns out to be unsupportable we take it out and say so, rather than softening the wording until it survives. Nothing here is worth defending past the point where the evidence runs out.
Money
How the project is funded
The guides are free. All of them, permanently. There is nothing on this site to buy, no payment is ever taken through it, and no part of the library is held back for people who pay.
The site carries no advertising. We sell no display space, run no sponsored guides, use no affiliate links, and never sell, rent or pass on reader details. There is no analytics or advertising tracking here at all; the single cookie we set only remembers whether you have seen the banner, as the cookie notice explains.
The running costs are small and ordinary — a domain, hosting, illustration and a great many unpaid evenings. Those evenings are given by the people whose roles are listed below, and that is the honest answer to who funds the writing.
Two things are quoted individually. Schools and libraries in New Zealand sometimes ask for printed classroom sets of a guide, or for one of our editors to run a reading session in person. Both are arranged by email and quoted case by case, because the figure depends on the number of copies, the freight and the travel involved. Those quotes are set to cover costs rather than to fund the site, and we publish no price list because a list would only be a guess at your request. If the cost is a problem for your school, say so; the guides stay free to read, print and photocopy.
The team
Who writes this
Thelmoros is small, and the work is divided by role rather than by byline. These are the jobs done before a guide reaches you.
- Coordinating editor. Decides what gets written next, keeps the index of source passages, and holds the schedule together.
- Writing editors. Two of them. They draft the guides and the longer reading notes, and neither is allowed to sign off their own work.
- Checking reader. Reads every draft against its source list before publication, and can send a guide back for more reading.
- Schools contact. Answers enquiries from teachers and librarians, and organises printed classroom sets and reading sessions.
- Illustrator. Draws every plate on the site. The illustrations here are our own work, not stock.
We do not publish staff names, photographs or qualifications, and we would rather you did not take our word for anything on that basis. A guide should be judged on whether its sources hold up, not on the letters after somebody’s name, and everything we assert can be traced to a named ancient text. That traceability is the only credential this sort of writing can honestly offer.
Every guide is signed the same way, by the Thelmoros editorial team. If you need something more specific for a citation — when a page was last revised, or last checked against its sources — write and ask. We are contactable in the ordinary way as well: the address, telephone number and email below are real, and answered Monday to Friday.
Start reading
The whole library is open right now
Six collections on Greek mythology, a shelf of longer reading notes, and a named source behind every claim. Nothing to sign up for. If you find something here that is wrong, tell us, and we will correct it in public with the date attached.