Following each retelling, Graves presents his interpretation of its origin and significance, influenced by his belief in a prehistoric Matriarchal religion, as discussed in his book The White Goddess and elsewhere.

[1] Graves interpreted Bronze Age Greece as changing from a matriarchal society under the Pelasgians to a patriarchal one under continual pressure from victorious Greek-speaking tribes.

In some cases Graves conjectures a process of "iconotropy", or image-turning, by which a hypothetical cult image of the matriarchal or matrilineal period has been misread by later Greeks in their own terms.

[2] Graves's imaginatively reconstructed "Pelasgian creation myth" features a supreme creatrix, Eurynome, "The Goddess of All Things",[3] who rises naked from Chaos to part sea from sky so that she can dance upon the waves.

Catching the north wind at her back and rubbing it between her hands, she warms the pneuma and spontaneously generates the serpent Ophion, who mates with her.

In the form of a dove upon the waves she lays the Cosmic Egg and bids Ophion to incubate it by coiling seven times around until it splits in two and hatches "all things that exist ... sun, moon, planets, stars, the earth with its mountains and rivers, its trees, herbs, and living creatures".

[4] In the soil of Arcadia the Pelasgians spring up from Ophion's teeth, scattered under the heel of Eurynome, who kicked the serpent from their home on Mount Olympus for his boast of having created all things.

The role played by the children of Mother Earths three original Cyclopes' offspring is specified by the author as he explains the interaction they would eventually have with the mythological figure of Odysseus.

[7] Graves's retellings have been widely praised as imaginative and poetic, but the scholarship behind his hypotheses and conclusions is generally criticised as idiosyncratic and untenable.

ISBN 0-521-33865-4 Mary Lefkowitz, Greek Gods, Human Lives Kevin Herbert: review of TGM; The Classical Journal, Vol.