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Liber X · Greek Mythology

Liber X · Greek Mythology

Greek Mythology: A Complete Guide to the Gods, Heroes and Myths

Greek mythology explained: what the myths are, where they come from, the gods from Chaos to Olympus, the heroes, Troy, the Underworld, monsters and religion.

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Greek mythology is the body of traditional stories that the ancient Greeks told about their gods, heroes and the origins of the world, from the emergence of Chaos and Earth to the return of the heroes from Troy. The myths were never fixed in a single sacred book: they lived in oral tradition, epic and lyric poetry, tragedy, vase painting and local cult, and they survive through authors such as Homer, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, Pindar, the tragedians, Apollodorus, Ovid and Pausanias. This guide outlines the whole tradition and leads to the detailed articles of this section.

What Is Greek Mythology?§

The Greek word mythos originally meant simply "speech" or "story"; only later, with philosophers and historians such as Plato and Thucydides, did it come to mean a tale that was not literally true, in contrast to logos, a reasoned account. For most Greeks the myths were the history of the distant past: Herodotus and Thucydides took the Trojan War as a real event, and cities, families and sanctuaries traced their origins to gods and heroes.

Because the stories were told by many voices over more than a thousand years, they never formed one system. A god might have two different births, a hero three different deaths, and the same event might be placed in Thessaly by one poet and in Crete by another. This guide, like the articles it introduces, treats myths as myths: it reports what the sources say, names them, and notes where they disagree.

The Sources of Greek Myth: From Homer to Ovid§

The earliest surviving sources are the two great epics attributed to Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, whose origins in oral poetry are discussed in Homer and the Homeric question, and the poems of Hesiod, the Theogony, which tells the origin of the gods, and the Works and Days (see Hesiod: Theogony and Works and Days). The thirty-three Homeric Hymns, composed by various poets mostly between the seventh and fifth centuries BCE, tell the births and deeds of individual gods. Lyric poets such as Pindar (c. 518–438 BCE) retold myths in praise of athletic victors.

The Athenian tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides reshaped many myths for the stage in the fifth century BCE, often in versions that became standard (see Greek tragedy and myth). Under the Roman Empire, the handbook known as the Library of Apollodorus summarised the whole mythology from creation to the death of Odysseus; Ovid's Metamorphoses (8 CE) wove some two hundred and fifty stories of transformation into one Latin poem; and Pausanias, in his Description of Greece (c. 150 CE), recorded the local legends he heard at temples and shrines. Painted pottery, temple sculpture and inscriptions add versions that no surviving text preserves.

From Chaos to Olympus: The Gods§

According to Hesiod, the world began with Chaos, a yawning gap, followed by Gaia (Earth), Tartarus and Eros, as told in the Greek creation myth. Gaia bore Ouranos (Sky), who was overthrown by his son Kronos; Kronos in turn was overthrown by his son Zeus in the war described in the Titans and the Titanomachy. The Titan Prometheus stole fire for mortals, and Zeus answered with the first woman, as told in Prometheus and Pandora. Zeus then had to defend his rule against Typhon and the monstrous brood of Echidna.

The new order was ruled by the twelve Olympians from Mount Olympus. At their head stood Zeus, king of the gods, with his wife Hera. Around them were Athena, goddess of wisdom and war; the twins Apollo and Artemis; the grain goddess Demeter, whose daughter's abduction is told in Demeter and Persephone; Hermes, Hephaestus, Ares and Aphrodite, together with Poseidon and Hestia; and the latecomer god of wine and ecstasy, described in Dionysus and the Bacchae. Beyond Olympus stood powers such as Hecate, goddess of crossroads and magic, and countless nymphs, river gods and local deities.

The Age of Heroes§

Between the gods and ordinary humans the Greeks placed the heroes, mostly sons and daughters of gods, who lived in the generations before and during the Trojan War. Hesiod's Works and Days calls them a race of demigods, better and more just than the bronze race before them. Each region had its great figures. Argos claimed Perseus, who beheaded the Gorgon; Thebes and Argos shared Heracles, greatest of all heroes, who performed the twelve labours and became a god; Athens had Theseus, slayer of the Minotaur. Thessaly and Corinth told of Jason and the Argonauts, who sailed for the Golden Fleece, and Thebes of the doomed royal line traced in Oedipus and the house of Thebes.

The stories often mirror one another: a divine father, a threatened infancy, impossible tasks and divine helpers. Many heroes were also worshipped after death at their tombs, a practice explored in Greek burial, the dead and hero cults.

The Trojan War and the Homecomings§

The heroic age ended with the war against Troy. According to the myth, the Trojan prince Paris carried off Helen, wife of Menelaus of Sparta, after Aphrodite promised her to him in the Judgment of Paris, and the Greeks under Agamemnon besieged the city for ten years. The causes, the siege, the wooden horse and the sack are told in the Trojan War, which also considers the archaeology of Troy at Hisarlik.

The Iliad covers only a few weeks of the tenth year, centred on the anger of Achilles. The return of the heroes, the nostoi, formed another cycle of epics, of which only the Odyssey survives: the ten-year voyage of Odysseus past the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens and the land of the dead to his home on Ithaca. Agamemnon's murder on his return, and his son's revenge, are told in the house of Atreus.

Death, the Underworld and the Monsters of Myth§

The Greeks imagined the dead as shades in the house of Hades, beneath the earth or at the edge of the world, beyond rivers such as the Styx and Acheron, as described in Hades and the Greek underworld. Most souls led a dim existence there, while a few great sinners were punished in Tartarus and a favoured few lived in Elysium or the Isles of the Blessed. Myths of descent into the underworld, by Heracles, Theseus, Odysseus and above all Orpheus and Eurydice, explored the boundary between life and death, and religious movements such as Orphism promised initiates a better lot beyond it (see Orphism and the Orphic gold tablets).

The myths are also full of monsters, often children of Typhon and Echidna or of the sea powers Phorcys and Ceto: the Gorgons, the many-headed Hydra, the Chimera, Cerberus and the riddling Sphinx (see the Sphinx, the Chimera and Typhon), as well as the perils Odysseus met at sea, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis. Wilder beings, centaurs, satyrs and nymphs, haunted the mountains and springs at the edge of the human world.

Myth, Religion and Interpretation§

Myth and worship were connected but not identical. Greek religion centred on sacrifice, festivals and sanctuaries rather than on creeds, as described in Greek religion and the mysteries and Greek sacrifice, festivals and temples. Myths explained the origins of rites and the founding of shrines, such as Apollo's Oracle of Delphi and the oak oracle and healing cults described in Dodona and Asclepius, while the Eleusinian Mysteries grew around the story of Demeter and her daughter.

The Greeks themselves began to interpret their myths. Xenophanes, around 500 BCE, attacked Homer and Hesiod for portraying immoral gods; Theagenes of Rhegium and later the Stoics read the gods as allegories of natural forces and virtues; Euhemerus, around 300 BCE, argued that the gods had been great kings deified after death; and the Neoplatonists found hidden metaphysical truths in Homer. Modern scholarship has added nature-mythology (Max Müller), ritual theories (James Frazer and Jane Harrison), psychoanalytic readings (Freud and Jung), the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Paris school of Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne, and comparative study of Near Eastern parallels. Through Rome, the Renaissance and modern art and psychology, traced in Greek myth after antiquity, the myths remain a common language of Western culture.

Frequently asked questions§

What are the main sources of Greek mythology?§

The oldest are Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days, followed by the Homeric Hymns, Pindar and the Athenian tragedians. Later handbooks such as Apollodorus's Library, Ovid's Metamorphoses and Pausanias's Description of Greece preserve many stories and variants that earlier texts do not.

Did the ancient Greeks believe their myths?§

Belief varied. Most Greeks accepted the gods and treated the heroic age as real history, but educated writers from the sixth century BCE onwards criticised or reinterpreted the stories, and no one was required to believe any particular version.

What is the difference between Greek and Roman mythology?§

The Romans had their own gods and legends but from an early date identified their deities with Greek ones, Jupiter with Zeus, Minerva with Athena, Venus with Aphrodite, and adopted Greek myths wholesale. Much of what later Europe knew of Greek myth came through Latin authors, above all Ovid.

Sources and further reading§