Terms of use

These are the terms you accept by using MythosPedia. They are short because the site is a place to read things.

Using the site

Read, quote, link and share freely. Reading costs nothing and requires nothing of you except not attacking the thing: no scraping the whole corpus for republication, no attempts to disrupt the service, no automated hammering of the servers. Bots that respect the robots file and crawl at a sane rate are welcome, since being findable is the point.

Who owns what

Two different kinds of material sit on these pages and they have different owners.

The ancient texts and the classical artworks reproduced here are in the public domain and belong to everybody — the Theogony, the Eddas, the Book of the Dead, a Greek vase in a museum, a Renaissance canvas of Danaë. Nothing on this site claims any right over them, and you should feel free to go to the sources directly.

The writing is a different matter. The retellings, portraits, comparisons, family-tree data and essays here are original work, written for this site, and they remain its property. Quoting a paragraph with a link is fair use and is welcome. Republishing pages wholesale, or feeding the corpus into a content mill, is not, and it is also easy to detect: the prose is deliberately idiosyncratic.

Accuracy, and its limits

Every page is written from named ancient sources and checked against standard scholarly editions. Mythology is nonetheless a field of disputed readings, contested dates, broken tablets and competing reconstructions, and nothing here is offered as a final word. Do not use this site as your only authority for academic work — follow the sources named on each page to the editions themselves, which is exactly why they are named. Corrections that cite a source are acted on and the page changes.

Purchases and refunds

Paid downloads are processed by Stripe. A purchase gives you a personal, non-transferable licence to use the file: print it, mark it up, use it in your own classroom or at your own table. It does not transfer copyright and does not license redistribution. If a download does not arrive, or is not what was described, email contact@mythospedia.com within thirty days and you will be refunded without an argument about it.

Using this material in teaching and at the table

Two uses come up often enough to answer here in advance. A teacher may print a page, a family tree or a myth retelling for a class, and a games master may print or adapt one for a table, without asking and without payment; attribution and a link are appreciated rather than required. Neither use may be resold, bundled into a paid course pack, or published as your own. If your intended use is commercial, ask — the answer is usually yes with a credit line attached.

Machine use is treated differently from human use. Training a model on this corpus, or reproducing it through a generated summary that replaces the page, is not permitted by these terms, and the site's robots file states the same thing in the form crawlers read.

Liability

The site is provided as it is. It cannot be guaranteed to be available without interruption or free of error, and no responsibility is accepted for loss arising from relying on it. Nothing in these terms limits any liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

Links out

Pages here link to other sites where a reader's next question is genuinely answered better elsewhere, including a small number of related reference sites run by the same person. Those links are editorial rather than paid placements, and no link on this site is sold. What happens on another site is governed by that site's own terms, not these.

Changes

These terms will change as the site grows — a new paid product, a different service handling email, a new section with its own rules. The version on this page is always the current one, and material changes are dated here rather than made quietly.