I tried to read The White Goddess about a year or two ago, and I gave up midway through. As much as I like Robert Graves, that book exists better in its ideas t

I tried to read The White Goddess about a year or two ago, and I gave up midway through. As much as I like Robert Graves, that book exists better in its ideas than its execution: the prose itself read more like a brain-dump by a clearly brilliant individual than a focused work. I'm not a Classics expert by any stretch, but t consider myself reasonably well-versed in Greek mythology and history/archaeology of the ancient world. Nonetheless, Graves writing makes no distinction between fact and assertion, and so it's quite hard to tell at times which is which. If he says something like "Hercules was originally a cult-hero worshipped in Crete", is that a fact, or his assertion? Should I expect a footnote to substantiate it, or is that such a well-known fact among Classical scholars that it's my deficiency for not knowing it? His book has about fifty of these on every page. It's bloody difficult to follow, as a result. I think he did a much better job, to be honest, when he implemented his White Goddess theory into his retelling of Jason and the Argonauts, Hercules My Shipmate. At least there you understood the theory through the context of the narrative.