COLLECTION
Stories connected by a shared idea.
Two eagles sent by Zeus were said to have met at Delphi, and there Apollo shot a she-dragon and took over an oracle that had belonged to Earth. For centuries a woman of Delphi gave his answers from a tripod, and whether a gas from the rock helped her is still argued.
Read story 14 min readA quarrel among three goddesses, a queen carried off from Sparta and ten years of siege: no single ancient poem tells the whole Trojan War. Homer's Iliad covers about fifty days of it, and the wooden horse is not among them.
Read story 14 min readZeus swallowed her mother, and Athena came out of his head in full armour while Olympus shook. She went on to win Athens from Poseidon with an olive tree, and to punish a girl in Lydia who wove as well as she did.
Read story 12 min readDaedalus built the labyrinth on Crete, then wings of feathers and wax to escape the king who held him there. He told his son to fly neither too high nor too low, and the sea where Icarus fell still bears his name.
Read story 13 min readOrpheus sang his way into the land of the dead and won his wife back on one condition, and a few steps from the light he looked back. That loss is first told by Roman poets; several Greek writers before them speak as if he brought her home.
Read story 12 min readHera's trick at his birth put Heracles in the service of a lesser cousin, and the labours he did for him ended with his rise to the gods. Yet the oldest poems never count the labours, and in the fullest Greek account the oracle orders ten.
Read story 11 min readHades carried Demeter's daughter down to the dead, and her mother kept the seed in the ground until the gods gave her back. But Persephone had eaten a pomegranate seed below, so for part of every year she must return, and the oldest telling never says that part is winter.
Read story 12 min readA prince from Troezen sailed to Crete among the young Athenians sent to the Minotaur, came out of the labyrinth by Ariadne's thread, and forgot to change his sail on the way home. Plutarch, who tells the story most fully, also reports a Cretan version in which the Minotaur was a general named Taurus.
Read story 12 min readThe gods made the first woman as the price of fire, and she lifted the lid of a great jar that let countless evils loose among men. In Hesiod it is a storage jar: it became a box in 1508, in a book by Erasmus.
Read story 11 min readPrometheus tricked Zeus over the shares of a sacrifice, stole back the fire Zeus withheld in a fennel stalk, and was chained where an eagle came every day for his liver. In the oldest poems he is the champion of humankind, not its maker: the clay came later.
Read story 11 min readKronos swallowed his children as they were born, until he was handed a stone in place of the youngest. That child, Zeus, grew up hidden on Crete and became the third king of heaven, though the Greeks never agreed on where he was hidden, or even on whether he was the youngest.
Read story 9 min readHomer's gods feast on a real mountain, snowy and many-ridged, between Thessaly and Macedonia, yet the Odyssey already pictures an Olympus that no wind, rain or snow can reach. In 1961, on one of its peaks, builders found the remains of sacrifices to Zeus.
Read story 8 min readOdysseus helped take Troy, then spent ten more years trying to get home. Homer is precise about why: he blinded the sea god's son, and his crew ate the cattle of the Sun.
Read story 10 min readIn the oldest account, Medusa is born a Gorgon, the only one of three sisters who can die. The beautiful girl punished by Athena arrives some seven hundred years later, in a Roman poem.
Read story 9 min readJason sailed to the far end of the Black Sea for a fleece of gold, and Medea, the king's daughter, helped him take it. The Odyssey already calls his ship "famed of all", and later tellers kept changing it, down to who killed Medea's children.
Read story 11 min read
