Across millennia, the stories that survived were not necessarily the grandest or the truest, but the ones that carried a single unforgettable image — a thread, a horse, wings dissolving in sunlight — simple enough for a child to hold and wise enough for an adult to keep. A generation of Irish schoolchildren encountered the ancient world through carefully curated classroom readers, and in that editorial act of omission and selection, something ancient and human was quietly preserved. The question such survival raises is not merely historical but urgent: which of our own tangled present-day stor