I was extremely aware that Eugenides was coyly keeping something back as a narrator and was probably the Thief when I read the book for the first-time-I-remember in college, but also I got so many moments of, like, narrative half-remembered resonance throughout the experience that I walked away convinced that I had probably actually read it for the first time a few years prior and had simply forgotten all about it. Unfortunately I only started keeping records of my reading after that date so the truth will never be known! (But I tend to keep an extra eye on first-person narrators in case they are cleverly dancing around some particular piece of truth -- I blame Mary Stewart's Ivy Tree for that one.)

The Temple scene is so good, the best part of the book, IMO. I love all the other books for a lot of other reasons but I'm not sure she ever again matches quite that level of eerie helplessness in the hands of the gods.