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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK
OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY

‫ﱙﱚﱙ‬

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THE ROUTLEDGE
HANDBOOK OF GREEK
MYTHOLOGY
‫ﱙﱚﱙ‬
Based on

H.J. Rose’s Handbook of
Greek Mythology

Robin Hard

First published 2004
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
© 2004 Robin Hard
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any
electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this title
ISBN 0-203-44633-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-75457-3 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0–415–18636–6 (Print Edition)

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In Memory of
LAUNCELOT FREDERIC HARD
1916–2002

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CONTENTS

‫ﱙﱚﱙ‬

List of illustrations
Preface xv

xi

1 Sources for Greek Myth

1

2 The beginnings of things
First beginnings 21
The family of Night 25
Gaia, Ouranos and the Titans 31
Descendants of the Titans;  40
The family of Pontos and Gaia 50

21

3 The rise of Zeus and revolts against his rule
The Greek succession myth 65
The further mythology of Kronos and Rhea 69
Zeus and his earlier life 73
The brides of Zeus and the origins of the Olympian gods
The revolt of Typhon 82
The revolt of the Giants 86
The Aloadai and their revolt 91
Zeus and Prometheus 92

65

4 The brothers and sisters of Zeus
Poseidon, the lord of the seas and the earthquake 98
Hades and the mythology of the Underworld 107
Hades, Persephone and Demeter 125
Hera 134
Hestia, the virgin goddess of the hearth 139
5 The younger Olympian gods and goddesses
Apollo 142
Hermes 158
vii

76

98

141

— Contents —
Hephaistos 164
Ares 168
Dionysos 170
Athena 180
Artemis and her cousin Hekate
Aphrodite 194

186

6 Lesser deities and nature-spirits

204

7 The early history of the Inachids

225

8 The life of Herakles and return of the Heraklids
The birth of Herakles and his early life at Thebes 246
The labours of Herakles 254
Herakles’ servitude to Omphale and major campaigns 272
The later life of Herakles in central and northern Greece 279
The return of the Heraklids 286

246

9 The mythical history of Thebes
The foundation and early history of Thebes 294
The Theban wars and their aftermath 315

294

10 Legends of Crete and Athens
Minos, Theseus and the Minotaur 336
The brothers and descendants of Minos 349
Theseus, king of Athens 356
The Athenian royal family 363

336

11 Jason and the Argonauts

377

12 The history of the Deukalionid family
Deukalion and his immediate family 402
The daughters of Aiolos and their descendants 409
The sons of Aiolos and their descendants 420

401

13 The Trojan War
The origin of the war and the Greek crossing 437
Leading figures in the conflict 451
The course of the war and the sack of Troy 461

437

14 The returns of the Greeks and the history of the Pelopids
The return journeys of the Greeks 481
The wanderings of Odysseus and his later life 492
The history of the Pelopids 501

481

viii

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15 The Atlantids, the Asopids and the Arcadian royal family
The Atlantids 517
The Asopids 529
The Arcadian royal family 537

517

16 Legends of Greek lands

550

17 Aeneas, Romulus and the origins of Rome

584

Notes
Bibliographical note
Genealogical tables
Indexes
Main Index
The Great Olympian Gods
Selective Geographical Index

603
690
693
715
716
743
751

ix

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ILLUSTRATIONS

‫ﱙﱚﱙ‬

MAPS
1
2
3

Mainland Greece
The Aegean area
The Mediterranean world

xviii
xix
xx

FIGURES
2.1 Garden of the Hesperides, by Frederick Lord Leighton
2.2 Herakles holds up the sky for Atlas. Drawing after a Greek
vase-painting
2.3 A Nereid riding a cuttlefish. Drawing after a Greek vase-painting
2.4 Peleus wrestles with Thetis. Red-figure vase-painting
2.5 Running Medusa (Gorgon). Amphora
2.6 Perseus slaying the Gorgon. Ivory relief, sixth century BC
2.7 Bellerophon slaying the Chimaira
3.1 Rhea-Kybele. Marble statue, Roman period
3.2 Typhoeus. Bronze relief: shield band panel from Olympia
3.3 The Battle of the Gods and Giants. A detail of the Great
Altar of Pergamon
3.4 Pandora, by Harry Bates (1891). Marble, ivory and bronze
4.1 Theseus under the sea. G. 104, Attic red-figure cup by Onesimos
4.2 Charon and Hermes. Attic white ground lekythos 2777,
c. 440 BC
4.3 Ixion bound on his wheel. Lucanian cup, 400–380 BC
4.4 Rape of Persephone: Fresco from Tomb II at Vergina,
350–25 BC
4.5 Demeter and Kore. The Eleusis relief, fifth century BC
4.6 Triptolemos in his chariot, surrounded by the gods
5.1 Apollo and Herakles struggle for the tripod at Delphi. Redfigure vase, c. 525 BC
xi

29
50
51
53
59
60
63
72
82
87
94
105
111
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126
127
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— Illustrations —
5.2
5.3
5.4
5.5
5.6
5.7
5.8
5.9
5.10
5.11
5.12
6.1
6.2
7.1
7.2
8.1
8.2
8.3
8.4
9.1
9.2
9.3
10.1
10.2
10.3
11.1
11.2
11.3
12.1
12.2
13.1
13.2

Apollo and the Crow. White ground kylix, fifth century BC
Dying Niobid. Roman marble sculpture
Hermes. Roman marble sculpture
A herm-maker. Red-figure cup, c. 510 BC
The return of Hephaistos to Olympos
Herakles and a kēr. Drawing after an Attic vase
Dionysos. Hellenistic marble sculpture
Ikarios receives the gift of wine from Dionysos. Marble relief
Dionysos transforms the mast of a ship into a vine, and the sailors
into dolphins. Attic cup by Exekias, c. 530 BC
Birth of Athena. Drawing from a bronze relief, shield band panel
from Olympia, c. 550 BC
Artemis. Roman marble sculpture
Satyrs in action. Attic red-figure cup
Pan. Detail from a Roman marble sculptural group
Hermes killing Argos Panoptes. Io, on the right, is oddly represented
as a bull. Attic red-figure amphora, c. 480 BC
Perseus and Andromeda, by Frederick Lord Leighton
The baby Herakles strangles the serpents sent by Hera.
Red-figure column krater
Herakles strangles the Nemean lion. Attic amphora, circle of
Exekias
Herakles and Amazon. Drawing after a vase-painting
Herakles and Athena. Interior of cup by Duris, c. 470 BC
Oedipus and the Sphinx. Red-figure kylix c. 470 BC, attributed
to the Oedipus painter
Tydeus devours Melanippos’ brains. Terracotta relief from the
pediment of Temple A at Pyrgi. Etruscan, c. 460 BC
Descent of Amphiaraos. Etruscan Urn, Volterra
Pasiphae nurses the infant Minotaur. Interior of an Etruscan
canteen. 340–320 BC
Theseus and Ariadne
Theseus and the Minotaur
Jason disgorged by a dragon. Drawing after a red-figure cup
by Duris, c. 470 BC
Medeia helps Jason seize the Golden Fleece, second century AD
Medeia kills her children
Meleagros and other participants in the hunt for the Calydonian
boar. Detail from the François Vase, Attic black-figure volute
krater from Chiusi, c. 570 BC
Idas and Lynkeus with the Dioskouroi, stealing cattle. Relief
from the Siphnian treasury, Delphi
The Judgement of Paris, by Peter Paul Rubens
Iphigeneia is transformed into a deer. Apulian red-figure
volute krater

xii

150
156
159
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215
229
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263
285
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415
423
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13.3 Thetis makes Achilles invulnerable by dipping him in the River
Styx. Marble, by Thomas Banks
13.4 Achilles and Aias playing draughts. Drawing after a vase-painting
13.5 The dying Memnon is borne away by his mother, Eos (Dawn).
Red-figure cup by Douris
13.6 The voting over the arms of Achilles. Red-figure vase by Douris
13.7 Aias’ suicide. Attic cup, Brygos painter
13.8 The Wooden Horse. Drawing after an archaic vase
13.9 Return of Helen to Menelaos. Red-figure skyphos
14.1 Odysseus tied to the belly of a ram. Bronze group, sixth
century BC
14.2 Odysseus, tied to the mast, listens to the Sirens’ song. Red-figure
stamnos from Vulci
14.3 Penelope at her loom with Telemachos. Red-figure skyphos
16.1 Sculptural Group of a Seated Poet and Two Sirens, by an unknown
artist
16.2 Kaineus battered into the ground by Centaurs. Bronze relief from
Olympia, c. 650 BC
16.3 Blind Orion searching for the Rising Sun, by Nicolas Poussin
16.4 Pygmalion and Galatea (oil on canvas), by Jean Léon Gérôme
16.5 The Last Watch of Hero, by Frederick Lord Leighton

xiii

457
463
467
469
470
474
477
493
495
499
551
556
563
575
576

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PREFACE

‫ﱙﱚﱙ‬

Although this is essentially a new book in its present form, I originally embarked
on it with the intention of producing a revised version of H.J. Rose’s classic Handbook
of Greek Mythology, and the final product remains indebted to that work in many
respects, incorporating some material from it and following its general plan in parts,
especially in the chapters on divine mythology. Herbert Jennings Rose (1883–1961),
who was professor of Greek at St Andrews from 1927 to 1953, wrote extensively
on ancient religion and mythology, publishing an edition of Hyginus’ mythological
manual in 1928, and was also an accomplished translator who introduced works of
notable continental scholars such as M.P. Nilsson and R. Pettazzoni to an Englishspeaking audience. He remarks in the preface to his mythological handbook that he
felt impelled to write it because, as a teacher of Classics, he had often felt handicapped by the lack of book of moderate length containing an accurate account of
Greek mythology in accordance with the results of modern research; and the
resulting volume, which was first published in 1928, certainly fulfilled a need among
students and others who were interested in the subject. It has continued to be of
service, moreover, in more recent times, even though many books of a related kind
have been published since it first appeared, including various dictionaries of classical mythology and the two-volume surveys of Robert Graves (which has proved
very popular in spite of its eccentricities) and Carl Kerényi (the second volume of
which, The Heroes of the Greeks, was translated into English by Rose himself). After
it had remained in print for seventy years, however, its present publishers thought
it desirable that it should be revised to take account of advances in knowledge and
the changing needs of its readership. The book has inevitably come to seem oldfashioned or even unreliable in certain respects. To take only one example, advances
in archaeology and other disciplines and the decipherment of Linear B (a Mycenaean
script) have affected our understanding of the origins and earliest history of some
of the major gods (see e.g. p. 170). As a guide to the canon of Greek myth, the
book also had one notable shortcoming from the beginning, namely that the coverage
of heroic myth is disproportionately brief, especially when it is considered that Greek
myth as recorded in classical literature consists predominately of heroic legend (for
surprisingly few stories are recorded about the actions of the gods among themselves). I therefore undertook to prepare a revised edition by extending the coverage
xv

— Preface —
of this area of myth fairly considerably, with the addition of new chapters, and by
altering or augmenting the text to a more limited extent elsewhere to take account
of changing knowledge and requirements. The outcome turned out to be thoroughly
unsatisfactory, too much of a dog’s dinner to be at all palatable. If the original book
had been blander, such an approach might have proved practicable; but it is in fact
too personal, too idiosyncratic, to be amenable to discreet emendation and augmentation. It was necessary that a few gentle alterations should suffice or else that the
book should be substantially rewritten; and having already progressed some way
along the latter path, I decided to follow it to the end. Although the final work
owes more of a debt to Rose’s handbook than may be apparent at first sight, and I
value that continuity, it is substantially longer and so different in much of its
approach and content that it cannot be regarded as a replacement or substitute. I
hope, indeed, that Rose’s book may be kept in print for a while yet and perhaps
even attain its centenary.
The names of deities and heroes and heroines from Greek myth are given in
their original Greek form, except in a very few cases where it would seem absurdly
pedantic to do so. Please see the introduction to the index for remarks on the pronunciation of Greek names and on the relationship between Greek and Latinized forms
of those names. In the case of geographical names and the names of mythical and
historical peoples, Anglicized and Latinized forms have been used much more
frequently when it was considered that such forms would be used in normal conversation (e.g. Boeotia rather than Boiotia). Since ancient Greek authors are almost
always referred to under the Anglicized or Latinized form of their name in conversation and in non-technical literature and library-indexes, it seemed preferable to
use such forms to accord with normal usage and avoid any danger of confusion.
When Greek tales from Roman sources are summarized in the text, the mythical figures who appear in them will naturally be referred to under their proper
Greek names rather than their Latin names as in the Latin sources. It should be
remembered in this connection that the Romans liked to identify Greek gods with
equivalent deities from the Roman and Italian tradition, and would refer to Greek
gods under their Latin names when narrating myths from the Greek tradition. In
the works of Roman authors such as Ovid and Hyginus, the main Greek deities
will thus appear as follows:

‫ﱚ‬

‫ﱚ‬

Aphrodite as Venus
Ares as Mars
Artemis as Diana
Athena as Minerva
Demeter as Ceres
Dionysos often as Liber (if not as Dionysus or Bacchus)
Hephaistos as Volcanus (Anglicized to Vulcan)
Hermes as Mercurius (Anglicized to Mercury)
Hestia as Vesta
Kronos as Saturnus (Anglicized to Saturn)
Poseidon as Neptunus (Anglicized to Neptune)
Zeus as Iuppiter (Anglicized to Jupiter)
xvi

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The name of Persephone was corrupted to Proserpina in Latin, that of Herakles to
Hercules, and that of Leto to Latona. Other names were translated, e.g. Eros to
Cupido or Amor, Pluto to Dis (see p. 108), Helios to Sol.
I have made my own translations when citing passages from Greek literature; these are intended above all to be clear and literal, and do not pretend to offer
an adequate impression of the literary qualities of the original.
When indicating the time of origin of Greek writings and legends, and so
on, it is often convenient or indeed necessary to refer to broad eras of Greek history
rather than to specific centuries or dates. The Archaic period can be regarded as
having extended from 800 or 750 BC to 480, i.e. from the end of the dark ages to
the time of the Persian Wars; the Classical period from 480 to the death of Alexander
the Great in 323 BC (or more loosely as extending over the fifth and fourth centuries,
which was generally speaking the period of the greatest cultural achievements of
the Greeks); the Hellenistic period from the death of Alexander to the end of the
first century BC; and the Roman period from the first century AD onward (or more
precisely from 31 BC, when Augustus defeated the forces of Antony and Cleopatra
at the battle of Actium).
The names of mythical characters are marked in capitals at the beginning
of the main discussion of their mythology; bold type is used to indicate that a
succession of mythical characters belong to a common group under discussion, for
instance as children of the same parents (as on p. 519) or as participants in a joint
enterprise (as on p. 317).

‫ﱚ‬
‫ﱚ‬

‫ﱚ‬

xvii

CHALCIDICE

L
PA
LE

EP

NE

IRU

Mt Olympos

S
Mt Ossa

TH

Dodona

ES

Corcyra l.

SA
LY

Iolkos
Pherai
Mt Pelion
Pagasai
GULF OF
Phylake
PAGASAI

PHTHIA

Leucas l.

AC

Malian
Gulf
Trachis
(Herakleia)

A

I.

Delphi
Mt Helikon

Daulis

IAN

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Salamis I.

Epidauros
Epidaur
os

GO

A

S

Mt Lykaion

C
or
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th
Mycenae
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Argos
Mantineia
Tiryns
Nauplia
Lerna
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AR

CA

IONIAN
SEA

Thebes

BOEOTIA

Aphidnai
Mt Kithairon
F
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n
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Athens

Troizen
Hermione

Tegea

MESSENIA
Pylos

Sparta
Amyklai

LACONIA

C. Malea

C. Tainaron

Cythera I.

Map 1

Mainland Greece

AT T IC A

AR

Olympia

Sicyon

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ym
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Mt Pholoe

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C. Sounion

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THRACE
Abdera
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PROPONTIS
Samothrace

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Abydos Hellespont

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Skyros

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C

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s

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Miletos
Naxos

Halicarnassus
Cos

SP

Melos

OR
AD

Cythera
Thera

Anaphe

ES

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Rhodes

CRE

Map 2

TE

Mt Ida
Knossos
Mt Dikte

The Aegean area

L

I
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Cyrene

cri

Lo

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Aegean
Sea

on

Memphis

EGYPT

CIL

R. Nile

R.
Phasis

n)
(Do
ais
n
Ta
R.

Salamis SYRIA

ICIA

R. Halys

Sinope

CYPRUS

Paphos

DES

RHO

CARIA
LYCIA

Troy

THRACE

Land of
Taurians

BLACK SEA

ASIA
MINOR

SCYTHIA

Mt Haimon

(D an

CRETE

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os

NIA
PAIO

R.

S

Map 3 The Mediterranean world

A

e

Greater
Syrtis

cus

E
S I Segesta pize
CI
ph
yre
LY Syra
an

Ionian
Sea

um
ent
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ot
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Lesser Syrtis

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A

Eryx

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Atlas Mts

RS OF H
E R A KLES

Cumae M
Naples

U

U
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LA
TI

Rome

IA

SANDINIA

CORSICA

UR
ic

Cadeira

IBERIA

R. Po

LIGURIA

R. Rhone

R
ET
iat
a
Se

IA

r
Ad

IA

ENIC

I
YR
LL
IRU

PHO

EP

CHAPTER ONE
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SOURCES FOR
GREEK MYTH

‫ﱙﱚﱙ‬

T

he myths of the ancient Greeks, like the myths of most other cultures, were
forever in a state of flux, undergoing constant change as they were passed on
by word of mouth and retold in different ways by authors of successive ages. A
handbook such as this must aim in the first place to provide a systematic account
of the canon of early Greek myth, as initially established in archaic and classical
poetic literature, especially early epic and tragedy, and then summarized and systematized in prose by the early mythographers. A good impression of the nature of the
resulting vulgate or standard tradition, as conceived by mythographers of the
Hellenistic or early Roman period, can be gained from the only general mythological handbook to survive from Greek antiquity, the Library of Apollodorus. The
main myths and legends were organized into a pseudo-historical pattern to provide
a remarkably coherent history of the universe and divine order and of the Greek
world in the heroic era (which was conventionally thought to have ended in the
period following the Trojan War); and this history was underpinned by rigorous
systems of divine and heroic genealogy, which were essential if consistent chronologies were to be developed. The individual myths within this broad framework
could be recorded in a variety of forms; even within the earlier literature, between
the time, say, of Homer and that of Euripides, they could undergo a multitude of
variations, and later developments could also leave their mark. Although powerful
versions might tend to establish themselves in the general imagination at the expense
of others, as in the case, for instance, of Aeschylus’ account of the murder of
Agamemnon (see p. 509), it is almost always misleading to talk as if there could
be a standard version of a myth that was set in stone from some early time. Quite
apart from merely narrating myths and placing them in their proper context within
the wider body of divine or heroic myth, a handbook must therefore also attempt
to trace the history of the more important myths, examining how they evolved over
time and came to be narrated in differing ways by different authors in different
genres. Since people who have an interest in Greek myth will not necessarily have
any very extensive knowledge of ancient literature, and since some authors and writings that are important for myth are not widely familiar outside specialist circles,
it was thought that it might thus be helpful to preface this handbook with a brief
survey of the main literary sources for Greek myth. The relevant authors are listed
1

— Sources for Greek Myth —
separately in alphabetical order rather than discussed together in their historical
setting to make it easier for readers to seek further information on authors or works
of literature that are mentioned in the main text.
Cross-references to other authors are marked by an asterisk preceding the name of the author.
For reasons indicated in the preface, ancient Greek authors are referred to under the
Anglicized form of their name (which is often of Latin origin) even though figures from
myth are referred to under the proper Greek form of their name. The authors who are named
in the list were Greek (or at least wrote in Greek) unless otherwise stated. The history of
Greece after the dark ages is conventionally divided into four main eras, the Archaic,
Classical, Hellenistic and Roman; please see the preface for the significance of these terms.

ACUSILAUS of Argos (probably writing at the end of the sixth century BC), early
mythographer who wrote about the legendary history of his native Argolid (see
p. 230) and other regions, providing prose accounts of many legends from the epic
tradition. Less is recorded about his writings than about those of his most important
successors, *Pherecydes and *Hellanicus.
AELIAN (Claudius Aelianus, c. AD 172–235), prose author whose Historical Miscellany and anthology of animal stories contain some material of mythological interest.
Translations of both are available in the Loeb series.
AESCHYLUS (525–456 BC), the earliest of the three great Athenian tragic poets
whose works are not entirely lost. Of the eighty or ninety plays of Aeschylus, six
of undoubted authenticity have survived. The three plays of the Oresteia trilogy,
which portray a cycle of revenge within the Pelopid ruling family at Mycenae, are
works of extraordinary profundity and resonance that can be ranked with the
Homeric epics as the most imposing monuments of ancient literature. The first play
in the trilogy, the Agamemnon, shows how the Mycenaean king of that name was
murdered by his wife Klytaimnestra (Clytemnestra) after he arrived back from the
Trojan War; and the next play, the Libation-bearers (Choephoroi), shows how
Agamemnon’s son Orestes, who was sent abroad before the murder and grew up in
exile, returned to Mycenae to avenge his father’s death by killing Klytaimnestra and
her lover Aigisthos. The final play in the trilogy, the Eumenides, shows how Orestes
was then persecuted by the Erinyes (Furies), even though Apollo had sanctioned the
killings, until he was acquitted of matricide at Athens at a trial superintended by
Athena (see p. 511). The other surviving plays are stiffer and less immediately
engaging. The Seven against Thebes, the last play in a Theban trilogy, tells how seven
champions from Argos confronted seven Theban defenders at the seven gates of
Thebes during the first of the two Theban Wars (see p. 321); and the Suppliants,
which was the last play in a trilogy devoted to the myth of the Danaids, tells how
the fifty Danaids approached the Argives as suppliants after fleeing from Egypt to
avoid marrying their cousins, the fifty sons of Aigyptos. There is very little direct
action in either play; indeed, more than half of the latter is composed of choral
lyrics. The Persians is one of the rare tragedies that dealt with historical subjects,
in this case the defeat of Xerxes during the Persian Wars. As regards the Prometheus
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Bound, the seventh play attributed to Aeschylus, there is disagreement on whether
it is a genuine work of Aeschylus or was written at a slightly later period by another
author (or at least heavily revised from a play by Aeschylus). It is remarkable in
any case for its unusual portrayal of Zeus, who is presented as a newly established
tyrant who exercises his power by the naked use of force. He has Prometheus nailed
to a rock to punish him for having opposed his will by championing the interests
of mortals; but Prometheus came to be released in a later play in the trilogy, and
some sort of reconciliation must therefore have been achieved between Zeus and
himself (see pp. 95–6).
ALCAEUS of Mytilene (born in the second half of the seventh century
lyric poet who was a contemporary and compatriot of Sappho.
ALCMAN (seventh century

BC),

BC),

an early

early author of choral lyric who lived in Sparta.

ANTONINUS LIBERALIS (probably second century AD), mythographer, author of
a surviving anthology of transformation myths, the Collection of Metamorphoses, which
provides prose summaries of forty-nine stories of the kind. Most of the narratives
are based on lost poetic accounts by two Hellenistic authors, *Nicander, who
composed a poem in five books on mythical transformations, and a certain Boio or
Boios (probably a pseudonym), who wrote a long poem called the Ornithogonia that
contained rather artificial tales in which groups of people were turned into birds.
There is an English translation by F. Celoria (London, 1992) and a French translation in the Budé series.
APOLLODORUS is the name traditionally ascribed to the author of the Bibliotheke
or Library, the only comprehensive mythological handbook to have survived from
classical antiquity. Although once regarded as a work of Apollodorus of Athens, a
learned scholar of the second century BC who wrote about mythology and religion
among other subjects, it is in fact a relatively late compilation of unpretentious
character, probably written in the first or second century AD. The final sections of
the book (dealing mainly with the Pelopids and the Trojan War) are preserved
only in two prose epitomes discovered in the late nineteenth century; but the narrative is so concise throughout that most readers are unlikely to notice any change.
The Library is in effect a mythical history of Greece, organized on a genealogical
basis in accordance with the pattern established in the Hesiodic Catalogue (see under
Hesiod) and followed by early prose mythographers such as *Pherecydes – the
authority most frequently cited – and *Hellanicus; and since it is largely based on
good early sources and very little has survived from the works of the early mythographers, it is extremely useful as a summary guide to the early vulgate tradition.
Even if it may seem rather elementary in parts, it provides the best surviving
accounts of many stories (hence the extensive use that has been made of it by
compilers of mythological dictionaries and handbooks), and the stories are all placed
in their proper context and accompanied by full genealogies. Translations are available in the Loeb series (in two volumes with useful references to other ancient
sources) and Oxford World Classics.
3

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APOLLONIUS of Rhodes (third century BC), a learned Hellenistic poet, author of
the Argonautica, an epic in four books that recounts the story of Jason’s quest for
the golden fleece and his travels with the Argonauts. Since nothing has survived of
early Argonautic epic, this is our main source for the legend along with the accompanying *scholia, which provide all manner of information on earlier versions of the
story and local legends associated with the voyage and other relevant matters. From
an artistic point of view, the poem is more impressive for its depiction of the
changing feelings of Medeia and the love that develops between her and Jason than
for its portrayals of heroic action. We also possess an incomplete Argonautica in Latin
by a poet of the first century AD, Valerius Flaccus, and a curious late poem in Greek,
the Orphic Argonautica, which is largely dependent on Apollonius (although it also
borrows from other sources and offers a divergent account of the return journey of
the Argonauts). A French translation of the latter poem may be found in the Budé
series. The Fourth Pythian Ode of Pindar provides the fullest earlier account of the
story of the Argonauts.
ARATUS (c. 315–240 BC), Hellenistic didactic poet, author of an extremely popular
astronomical poem, the Phaenomena, which describes the constellations and their
risings and settings on the basis of information provided by the great astronomer
Eudoxus of Cnidus (active in the first half of the fourth century BC). Although
Aratus lays no great emphasis on astral mythology, recounting or referring to such
myths on only twelve occasions, his poem did much to encourage popular interest
in the constellations and their myths. The standard collection of constellation myths
was compiled somewhat later by *Eratosthenes in a prose treatise. The scholia to
the Phaenomena have more to say about the matter, as do the Latin adaptations of
the poem by Germanicus Caesar (15 BC–AD 19) and Avienus (fourth century AD).
ARISTOPHANES (born mid-fifth century BC), Athenian comic playwright, author
of eleven surviving plays. Although not based directly on traditional myths as is
usually the case with early tragedy, these are sometimes of value for what they reveal
about particular myths or popular attitudes to myth and religion. The Frogs, in
which Dionysos and his slave Xanthias make a visit to the land of the dead, may
be singled out for what it reveals about the mythology and popular lore of the
Underworld in the classical period.
ARISTOTLE (Aristoteles, 384–322 BC), philosopher with an encyclopaedic range
of interest. His writings occasionally touch on mythological matters, and a spurious
work in the Aristotelian corpus, On Marvellous Things Heard, records some curious
mythological traditions relating to foreign parts. The remains of the pseudoAristotelian Peplos are of some interest for what they report about the fates of various
warriors who fought at Troy.
ATHENAEUS (writing in about AD 200), author of the Sophists’ Banquet (Deipnosophistai), an eccentric compilation in fifteen books that records more than anyone
could possibly want to know about banquets and convivialities. Since Athenaeus
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draws on a wide range of sources and is never reluctant to provide a quotation, much
of value that would otherwise have been lost, some of it relating to myth, is preserved
among the dross. There is a translation with a full index in the Loeb series.
BACCHYLIDES (died mid-fifth century BC), lyric poet, a nephew of Simonides and
contemporary of Pindar. Substantial remains of his epinician odes (choral
odes written in honour of victors at the games) and six of his dithyrambs have been
recovered from papyri discovered in the nineteenth century. The former poems
are constructed in a similar manner to those of *Pindar, with a mythical narrative
at their heart; and although Bacchylides lacks the dash and genius of his greater
contemporary, he has distinctive gifts of his own as a storyteller. A good impression of this may be gained from the fifth of his epinician odes, which describes how
Herakles met and conversed with the shade of Meleagros when he descended to the
Underworld to fetch Kerberos, and was moved to tears by his account of his premature death. Another well-preserved ode describes how the daughters of Proitos,
king of Tiryns, once offended Artemis and were stricken with madness until the
goddess was appeased. The dithyrambs also contain attractive mythical narratives,
describing for instance how Theseus proved to Minos that he was a son of Poseidon
(see pp. 345–6) or first arrived in his ancestral homeland of Athens.
BION of Smyrna (late second century BC), a pastoral poet who is best known as the
probable author of the Lament for Adonis.
CALLIMACHUS (c. 305–240 BC), Hellenistic poet and scholar who compiled the
classified catalogue of the books in the library at Alexandria. His six Hymns,
which are full of interesting mythological lore, have survived complete because some
editor in late antiquity included them in a collection of hymns along with the
Homeric Hymns and other poems of a comparable nature. Although modelled
on the *Homeric Hymns, they are altogether different in character, as would be
expected, as highly sophisticated poems that are learnedly playful and often gently
ironic in tone. The third hymn, addressed to Artemis, is particularly charming. The
fifth tells how Teiresias came to be struck blind after seeing Athena naked (see
p. 330), while the sixth describes how the Thessalian hero Erysichthon was punished
with insatiable hunger after felling some trees in a grove of Demeter (see p. 133).
Even if these poems may seem rather dry on first acquaintance, they can be very
beguiling when one comes to appreciate their author’s distinctive humour and tone
of voice. The rest of his poetry is preserved in fragments alone, many recovered from
papyri.
CICERO (106–43 BC), Roman politician, orator and prose writer, who sometimes
refers to Greek legends and mythical matters in his religious and philosophical
treatises.
COLLUTHUS (probably fifth century AD), author of the Rape of Helen, a mercifully
short epic poem in 394 lines; translated in the Loeb series.
5

— Sources for Greek Myth —
CONON (probably writing at the end of the first century BC or beginning of the
next), mythographer, author a collection of fifty legends of varied nature in which
foundation legends are especially prominent. It is preserved in an epitome prepared
by the Byzantine scholar Photius (and a French translation is thus available in the
Budé edition of Photius’ Library).
DIODORUS SICULUS (i.e. of Sicily, first century BC), Greek Sicilian historian,
author of a universal history in fourteen books. In contrast to historians of a more
critical turn of mind, Diodorus did not exclude the period of legend from his survey,
and the earlier books are thus of considerable value to the mythologist. As is understandable in a work with historical pretensions, he tended to favour rationalistic
accounts from the Hellenistic period, but some of the material that he included as
a consequence is of great interest in its own right, notably a report on *Euhemerus
and extracts from two works of Dionysius Scytobrachion (‘the Leather-armed’,
in reference to his prolific output) that offered novelistic versions of the myths of
the Argonauts and the Amazons. The fourth book, however, which deals with the
mythical history of the heartland of Greece, seems to have been largely based
on a mythological handbook and includes more conventional material from the
earlier vulgate. The biography of Herakles is worthy of special note since it provides
a valuable supplement to that in *Apollodorus’ handbook. There is an excellent
translation in Loeb series.
DIONYSIUS of Halicarnassus (first century BC), Greek literary critic and historian.
He lived at Rome for over twenty years, where he compiled the Roman Antiquities
(Romaikē Archaiologikē), a long and indeed tiresomely prolix history of Rome from
the earliest times up until the Punic Wars. The first book, which deals with the
prehistory of the area and the origins and founding of the city, has much to say
about Greek legend in so far as it relates to Rome and Italy.
EPIC CYCLE, and early epic in general (apart from the works of *Homer and
*Hesiod). (i) The epic cycle was a collection of early epic poems that were ordered
into a cycle to provide a chronological account of major episodes from Greek myth.
Although there may well have been different collections that varied in their content,
the poems that are described as cyclic in the surviving records are an obscure
poem called the Titanomachia, which dealt with the earliest history of the world and
the gods (presumably covering some of the same ground as the Theogony), and two
series of heroic epics, a shorter series dealing with the family of Oedipus and the
Theban Wars and a longer series dealing with the Trojan War and its origins and
aftermath. (ii) Although very little is known about the Titanomachia and the Theban
epics, we are better informed about the poems of the Trojan cycle, partly because
more fragments and testimonies have been preserved, and partly because we possess
short summaries of their contents that were compiled in the Roman period by a
certain *Proclus. The first of the Trojan epics, the Cypria, explained the origins
of the war and offered an account of its progress up until the period covered in
the Iliad. The significance of its title is wholly uncertain. The Aithiopis picks up
6

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the story again where the Iliad leaves off, describing how the Amazon Penthesileia
and the Ethiopian prince Memnon arrived to fight as allies of the Trojans (see
pp. 446ff). It also described the death of Achilles, who was shot by Apollo and Paris
as he was advancing toward the city after killing Memnon. The contents of the next
two epics, the Little Iliad (Ilias Mikra) and the Sack of Troy (Iliupersis), seem to have
overlapped to some extent. The former epic described the suicide of Aias (Ajax) and
the events that immediately preceded the fall of Troy, and apparently went on to
describe the sack itself, which was of course the subject of the latter poem. The
Returns (Nostoi) provided a supplement to the Odyssey by describing the return journeys of the main Greek heroes other than Odysseus (see pp. 482ff), and the final
epic in the series, a relatively late poem called the Telegonia, provided an eccentric
account of the later life of Odysseus after his wanderings (see pp. 500–1). Proclus’
summaries and fragments from the poems are translated in the Hesiod volume in
the Loeb series. (iii) Although we know the names of many other archaic epic poems
and epic poets, little or nothing is recorded about most of them. Various poets wrote
epics about Herakles, for instance, including a Spartan called Cinaethon and a
Rhodian called Peisander and, at a relatively late period, Herodotus’ uncle Panyassis
of Halicarnassus. Similar poems were written about Theseus, and the adventures of
Jason and the Argonauts must also have been a popular subject; the *scholia to
Apollonius tell us a certain amount about how the latter story was recounted in an
early epic called the Naupactia. The legends of the Greek regions would also have
been recounted in early epic; a poem called the Phoronis offered an account of the
earliest history of the Argolid (see p. 227) and a Corinthian epic poet called Eumelus
offered a distinctive account of the earliest history of his own land (see pp. 431–2).
Since epic poems, oral and written, would have been the main literary medium for
mythical narrative in the archaic period, it is salutary to remember how very little
we know about these early epics. For a helpful guide to this area of Greek literature, with translations of relevant passages, see G.L. Huxley, Greek Epic Poetry; Eumelos
to Panyassis (London, 1966).
ERATOSTHENES (c. 285–194 BC), versatile Alexandrian scholar who compiled the
standard collection of constellation myths, the Catasterisms (Katasterismoi). The short
book of that title that has been transmitted to us under his name is an epitome
that was prepared by some later author; further information about the contents of
the original work can be found in the Astronomy of *Hyginus and the scholia to
*Aratus’ Phaenomena and to Germanicus’ Latin adaptation of that poem. A translation of the epitome and the relevant section of Hyginus’ Astronomy can be found in
Theony Condos, Star Myths of the Greeks and Romans (Grand Rapids, 1997).
EUHEMERUS of Messenia (writing in about 300 BC), author of the Sacred Scriptures,
a book that explained the origin of the gods in rationalistic terms by suggesting
that they had been great rulers and conquerors of the past who had come to be
accorded divine honours. Although the original work is lost, much is known about
it from what is recorded by *Diodorus (6.1, easily accessible in the Loeb translation)
and Lactantius.
7

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EURIPIDES (c. 485–406 BC), Athenian tragic poet, a slightly younger contemporary of Sophocles. Since two collections of his plays have survived, one an
anthology put together in the Roman period and the other a section of an alphabetical edition of his complete works, we possess nineteen of his tragedies, far more
than for Aeschylus and Sophocles. Seven relate to the Trojan War and its aftermath.
The Iphigeneia at Aulis tells how that daughter of Agamemnon was brought to sacrifice to enable the Greek fleet to sail to Troy (see p. 447), while the Iphigeneia in
Tauris tells how she was recovered from the distant land of the Taurians by her
brother Orestes some years after the war (see pp. 512ff). The Rhesus (which may be
wrongly ascribed to Euripides) dramatizes a tale from the Iliad, telling how the
Thracian prince of that name was killed in his sleep by Odysseus and Diomedes
after he arrived at Troy to fight as an ally of the Trojans. The Trojan Women (Troades)
and the Hecuba (Hekabe) are poignant tragedies that portray the fate of leading women
of Troy after the fall of the city. The Helen is a curious tragicomedy based on an
unconventional version of Helen’s legend in which a phantom of her accompanied
Paris to Troy while she herself remained in Egypt during the years of the war (see
p. 445). Hektor’s widow Andromache was said to have become the concubine of
Achilles’ son Neoptolemos in Epirus after the war; Euripides’ Andromache presents
her as falling victim to the jealousy of Neoptolemos’ childless wife Hermione, who
plots unsuccessfully to kill her along with her young son (see p. 515). Three other
tragedies of Euripides are devoted to Theban myth. The Bacchae, a very late work
and perhaps the finest of the surviving plays, shows how Pentheus, king of Thebes,
was visited with a gruesome punishment when he tried to outlaw the unbridled
rites of Dionysos (see p. 173). The Phoenician Women is a very long play (apparently
with a post-Euripidean ending) that deals with the quarrel between the sons of
Oedipus and the resulting Theban War, while the Suppliants tells how the mothers
of the Argive chieftains who were killed in the conflict sought the help of Theseus
after the Thebans forbade the burial of the Argive dead. The plots of two tragedies
that are devoted to stories from Athenian myth, the Hippolytus and the Ion, are
summarized below on pp. 358–9 and 407–8. Three other plays deal with Herakles
and his children. The Alkestis tells how Herakles saved Alkestis from death after
she volunteered to die in place of her husband Admetos, while the Madness of Herakles
tells how the hero rescued his family from a usurper at Thebes but then proceeded
to slaughter his children in a fit of madness inspired by Hera. Soon after the death
of Herakles, Eurystheus, king of Mycenae, tried to save himself from any future
threat from the family by eliminating the hero’s children; in the Children of Herakles
(Herakleidai), Euripides shows how they appealed to the Athenians as suppliants and
defeated and killed Eurystheus with their help. In the Orestes, the Mycenaean prince
of that name narrowly escapes death after being brought to trial by the citizens of
Argos for killing his mother Klytaimnestra and her lover Aigisthos; and the Medea
(Medeia) shows how the Colchian heroine of that name exacted revenge on her
husband Jason after he told her that he was planning to abandon her to marry a
Corinthian princess (see p. 398). And finally, the Cyclops is the only complete satyrplay to survive from antiquity; it offers a comical version of the Homeric story of
Odysseus and Polyphemos, in which Seilenos and his Satyrs are presented as having
been taken prisoner by the ogre just before the arrival of Odysseus.
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EUSTATHIUS (twelfth century AD), Byzantine scholar and churchman, author of
long surviving commentaries on the Iliad and the Odyssey. These are of value in so
far as they preserve material from the ancient scholarly tradition that would otherwise have been lost.
HELLANICUS of Lesbos (active in the second half of the fifth century BC), mythographer and author of writings on ethnography and chronology. More is recorded
about his works than those of any other early mythographer apart from *Pherecydes.
He compiled useful histories of various legendary families such as the Deukalionids
and Atlantids, and left his mark on the subsequent tradition by refining and synchronizing the heroic genealogies. He was apparently an inelegant writer, however, whose
narratives were less appealing than those of Pherecydes. Through his Atthis, a local
history of Attica (which is mentioned by Thucydides, 1.97, though not with any
great enthusiasm), he helped to inaugurate the distinctive genre of Atthidography
(see p. 363).
HERODOTUS (fifth century BC), author of a long historical work in nine books,
the Histories (Historiai, i.e. ‘Investigations’), which provides an account of the conflict
between Greece and Persia and its historical background. It is a very wide-ranging
study that sets out to explain the growth of Persian power in relation to the histories of other lands outside Greece and developments within the Greek world itself.
It is of great value as a source for legend and for matters relating to legend, all the
more so since the author is always willing to digress and can never resist a good
story.
HESIOD (c. 700 BC), Boeotian epic and didactic poet. (i) Two surviving poems,
the Theogony and the Works and Days, can be regarded as genuine works of Hesiod
(even if it is not universally agreed that they can be ascribed to the same poet).
One further poem, the Shield, which was certainly not of his authorship, has been
transmitted to us under his name, and a number of other poems are ascribed to him
in ancient sources. Very little is known of most of these other poems, but one of
them, the Catalogue of Women, which was again of post-Hesiodic origin, was a mythological poem of considerable importance that can be partially reconstructed from
many surviving fragments and testimonies. (ii) The Theogony (Theogonia, i.e. birth
or generation of the gods) provides a comprehensive genealogical history of the
origins of the gods, explaining how the universe and the main gods and goddesses
came into being, and how the present divine order came to be established under
the third ruler of the universe, Zeus. Since this was not only a very ancient account
of these matters but came to be accepted as the standard account, the poem is a
mythological document of the first importance, and we will take it as our main
guide in Chapter 2 and much of Chapter 3. It also describes how Zeus quelled a
revolt by the fearsome monster Typhon. The end of the poem was altered when the
Catalogue of Women was appended to it, but although it is accepted that part of the
concluding section of the present text is post-Hesiodic, scholars have disagreed as
to where exactly the genuine work of Hesiod breaks off. The most distinguished
modern editor of the poem, M.L. West, has argued that the end comes at line 900,
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— Sources for Greek Myth —
while others would place it later at line 929 or 962. (iii) As a poem that is mostly
about farming and favourable and unfavourable days of the month, the Works and
Days is less relevant to our subject, except in the two sections of the poem that
narrate the story of the first woman Pandora (42–105) and the myth of the five
races (106–201, see pp. 69–70). (iv) The only other complete poem to be preserved
under Hesiod’s name is the Shield (Aspis), a short work in 480 lines that describes
how Herakles defeated the Thessalian villain Kyknos and his divine father Ares in
two successive fights (see p. 282). The poem is known as the Shield because more
than a third of it is devoted to a description of the images on Herakles’ shield, in
a passage that was evidently modelled on Homer’s description of the shield of
Achilles in the Iliad. It is prefaced with an ehoie (see below) from the Catalogue
relating to Alkmene and was presumably written after that poem in the sixth century
BC. A translation can be found in the Hesiod volume in the Loeb series; since the
author was too incompetent to be able to organize his material properly or bring
his subject to life, the poem cannot be said to be anything more than a historical
curiosity. (v) Most of the other poems that were ascribed to Hesiod are little more
than names to us. They include an astronomical poem known as the Astronomia and
a book of moral precepts known as the Maxims of Cheiron, and mythological poems
such as the Melampodia, which recounted the legends of Melampous and other
seers (providing for instance an account of the contest in divination between Mopsos
and Kalchas, see p. 488), and the Aigimios, which is named after a Dorian associate
of Herakles but apparently recounted a variety of legends including that of Io.
(v) The genealogical epic known as the Catalogue of Women – or simply the Catalogue
– is the only pseudo-Hesiodic poem (apart of course from the Shield) of which we
possess substantial remains. Well after the lifetime of Hesiod, probably in the early
sixth century BC, some unknown author decided to write a continuation to the
Theogony so as to provide a genealogical history of the main heroic families also. As
was noted above, the end of the Theogony was altered quite radically to prepare for
the transition to this new subject-matter, as can be appreciated from the present
state of the text. Since the origin of each of the main heroic lines was traced to a
mating between a god and a mortal woman, the new poem (or relevant portion of
the combined poem) came to be known as the Catalogue of Women; it was also called
the Ehoiai because the story of each of these women was introduced with the formulaic phrase ē hoiē, ‘or like she who . . .’. From its semi-divine beginning, each heroic
line would have been followed down to the period of the Trojan War or thereabouts,
and the principal legends associated with the members of the line would have been
narrated, usually quite briefly, as the successive heroes and heroines were introduced.
It was a work of the first importance, comparable in its own way to the Theogony,
because it established the panhellenic system of heroic genealogy that was adopted
and refined by the early prose mythographers (such as *Pherecydes and *Hellanicus)
and can still be recognized, though with many variations from the later tradition,
in the mythological handbook of *Apollodorus. In tracing the histories of such families as the Inachids, Deukalionids and Atlantids in the second part of the present
handbook, we will be following the lines that were laid down by the Cataloguepoet. Although no manuscripts of the poem have survived, a fair number of
quotations and testimonies can be found in the works of ancient authors, and many
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additional fragments, some quite extensive, have been recovered from papyri. As a
consequence, a surprising amount has come to be known about the structure of the
poem, and parts of it can be reconstructed in some detail; for a full discussion, see
M.L. West, The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women (Oxford, 1985). Many of the individual
fragments are translated in the Hesiod volume in the Loeb series, but they lose
much of their meaning when taken out of context. There is an Italian parallel translation of the standard edition of Merkelbach and West (from Fragmenta Hesiodea,
Oxford, 1967) in the Hesiod volume in the French Pléiade series; it may be hoped
that someone will publish a similar translation in English one day.
HOMER (probably late eighth century BC). (i) The Iliad and the Odyssey, the national
epics of the Greeks, were traditionally ascribed to a poet called Homer (Homeros),
on whom we have no trustworthy information. There is disagreement on whether
the two poems can be ascribed to the same author (and indeed on whether each of
them was basically the work of a single author, although scholars have been less
inclined to attempt to trace different sections to different origins since greater understanding has been gained of the process of creation in oral poetry). There is good
reason to suppose that they were composed in Ionia on the west coast of Asia Minor.
They certainly contain some later interpolations, even if these cannot always be
recognized with any assurance. (ii) In contrast to the usual pattern in epic, in which
a succession of episodes would be described in simple chronological order and the
traditional history of the war or adventure or whatever provided the principle of
unity, the entire narrative of the Iliad is ordered around a single incident in the
tenth year of the Trojan War – the anger and withdrawal of Achilles – and the
time-span is comparatively restricted. The main action is concentrated in a period
of only four days and nights, and the span of the whole story does not extend beyond
fifty-one days; but the poem is artfully constructed so as to make it seem that it
epitomizes the entire trajectory of the war. The articulating theme of the poem,
as announced in the first line, is the wrath of Achilles, the mightiest of the Greek
warriors, who withdraws from the fighting in anger at being deprived of his captive
maiden Briseis by the Greek commander Agamemnon, giving the Trojans an opportunity to advance out of their city and place the Greek army under severe threat;
but after his closest friend Patroklos is killed, he returns to the battlefield to seek
vengeance and drives the Trojans back, killing many of them including their greatest
warrior, Hektor. A full summary of the plot may be found on pp. 462ff. (iii) The
poem makes many allusions to the preceding history of the war and to its conclusion and aftermath, and also refers to events from the earlier lives of the participants
and to stories from other cycles of legend and from divine mythology. The loquacious Nestor likes to reminisce about his youthful adventures in the western
Peloponnese, and Phoinix recounts the story of the Aetolian hero Meleagros while
trying to persuade Achilles to return to the fight (see p. 417); but full narratives
of stories that have no direct connection with the war are naturally infrequent. The
long muster-list in the second book (the so-called ‘catalogue of ships’, 2.493–759)
preserves a large amount of very ancient information about the geography of Greece
in the legendary era and the heroic families that were supposed to have ruled in it.
A useful summary of the mythical history of Troy is provided by Aineias in the
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twentieth book (208–40). The poem also has much to say about the lives and characters of the gods. It records two versions, for instance, of myth in which the young
Hephaistos was said to have been hurled down from Olympos (see p. 165). (iv) The
hero of the Odyssey, Odysseus, was a cunning and resourceful warrior who came from
the island of Ithaca off the west coast of Greece. The epic describes how he wandered
through distant seas for ten long years after being driven far off course while sailing
home from Troy, and exacted vengeance on his return against a crowd of local
noblemen who had been revelling in his palace during his absence, squandering his
property and courting his wife. See pp. 492ff for a summary of his adventures. The
epic falls into three main parts. The first four books (the so-called Telemachia) tell
how Telemachos, the young son of Odysseus, visited Nestor at Pylos and Menelaos
at Sparta to seek news of his missing father; the next eight books (5–12) describe
the adventures of Odysseus in foreign seas, partly as narrated by Odysseus himself
at a banquet in his last port of call (9–12); and the last twelve books tell how he
arrived home in Ithaca, exacted vengeance against the suitors after due preparation,
and was reunited with his faithful wife Penelope. In books 3 and 4, the poem reveals
a fair amount about the events that immediately followed the sack of Troy, and
about how other heroes, including Agamemnon, fared during their return voyages
and after arriving home (see pp. 482ff).
HOMERIC HYMNS, a collection of thirty-three poems in epic metre addressed to
various greater and lesser deities. Although widely ascribed to Homer in ancient
times, they are in fact of varied authorship and were composed at widely differing
times, ranging from the seventh or eighth century BC to the fifth century or even
later. While many are no more than brief preludes (prooimia) that would be chanted
by rhapsodes before epic recitations, a few are substantial narrative poems of considerable charm that describe important episodes in the lives of the gods. The Hymn
to Demeter (no. 2) tells how the corn-goddess Demeter searched for her daughter
Persephone after she was abducted by Hades, and finally forced Zeus to take action
on her behalf by causing the earth to remain barren and so depriving the gods of
their sacrifices (see pp. 126ff). The poem explains the origin of the Eleusinian
Mysteries and alludes to various aspects of Eleusinian cult, and was presumably
composed in the area of Eleusis, perhaps in the late seventh century BC. The Hymn
to Apollo (3), which may well have been put together from two originally separate
poems, describes how Leto came to give birth to her divine twins Apollo and Artemis
on the island of Delos, and goes on to explain how Apollo came to establish his
oracle and shrine at Delphi (see pp. 144 and 188). The Hymn to Hermes (4), which
is broadly humorous in tone, describes how the infant Hermes set off to rustle the
cattle of Hermes on the day of his birth, but reached an accommodation with Apollo
soon afterwards and was assigned his main functions as a god (see pp. 161ff). The
longer of the two hymns addressed to Aphrodite, the fifth, describes how the goddess
seduced Anchises, a member of the Trojan royal family, on Mount Ida in the Troad
and conceived Aineias to him (see pp. 200–1ff). The much shorter Hymn to Dionysos
(7) describes how some pirates tried to abduct the god in his youth, provoking him
to transform them into dolphins after first working some miracles as a manifestation of his power (see p. 177). The short Hymn to Pan (19) is also of some interest
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for its description of the nature and birth of the goat-footed god. Translations are
available in the Hesiod volume in the Loeb series and elsewhere; they make delightful
reading even in a plain prose translation.
HYGINUS (Gaius Julius Hyginus), a learned freedman of Augustus who became
the librarian of the Palatine Library, the putative author of two works of mythological interest, the Fabulae (i.e. Mythical Tales, also known as the Genealogiae),
a handbook of mythology, and the Astronomia, a popular treatise on astronomy. Both
books were compiled from Greek sources. Since their author was a scholar of limited
competence who could make elementary mistakes in translating from the Greek, it
is generally agreed that these cannot be genuine works of Hyginus, and they were
probably written after his time in the second century AD. The 220 chapters of the
Fabulae consist either of brief mythological narratives or of catalogues (e.g. of mothers
who killed their sons, persons who were suckled by animals, inventors and their
inventions). Although the sources of the narratives are rarely indicated, the book
seems to draw most heavily on tragic sources. The second book of the Astronomia
contains the fullest surviving collection of constellation myths, derived mainly from
*Eratosthenes. English translations of the Fabulae and this ‘poetic astronomy’ may
be found in Hyginus, The Myths, ed. and trans. M. Grant (Lawrence, Kansas, 1960),
and there are good French translations, with useful notes, in the Budé series.
LUCIAN (Loukianos, second century AD), orator and prose-writer of Syrian birth
who quite often touches on mythological matters in his copious works. In some of
his satirical dialogues, most notably the Dialogues of the Gods and Dialogues of the
Sea-gods, he makes fun of the traditional portrayal of the gods and traditional themes
from myth, while other works, such as the Charon and the Dialogues of the Dead, are
of interest in relation to traditional ideas about the afterlife and Underworld.
LYCOPHRON (born c. 320 BC), Hellenistic poet, author of a mythological puzzlepoem, the Alexandra, in which the Trojan seer Kassandra delivers riddling prophecies
about the fall of Troy and the subsequent fates of those who took part in the war.
Although not exactly pleasurable reading, it is of great value as a source of mythological information if read in conjunction with the extensive ancient *scholia and
the Byzantine commentary of John Tzetzes. Particular attention is devoted to the
Italian West. Primarily on account of a seemingly anachronistic reference to Roman
power (1227ff), some scholars have argued that the poem must have been written
somewhat later by another author in the second century BC.
MIMNERMUS (second half of the sixth century BC), elegiac poet. The fragments
of one of his poems, the Nanno, contain interesting mythical allusions to Jason’s
quest and to Helios’ nightly journey to the place of his rising (see pp. 43–4).
MOSCHUS of Syracuse (second century BC), bucolic poet, author of an attractive
epyllion or miniature epic, the Europa, which tells how Zeus assumed the form of
a bull to abduct the heroine of that name from Phoenicia to Crete.
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MUSAEUS (probably late fifth century AD), author of an attractive miniature epic
that tells the tragic story of Hero and Leandros, two lovers who lived on opposite
banks of the Hellespont (see p. 577); a translation may be found in the Loeb series
(in the same volume as the fragments of Callimachus).
NICANDER of Colophon (second century BC), Hellenistic poet. Two of his didactic
poems, the Theriaka and Alexipharmaka (which dealt with poisonous animals and
antidotes to poisons respectively), have survived intact, but he was of greater importance from a mythological point of view for his lost Heteroioumena (i.e. Metamorphoses),
a collection of transformation myths. *Ovid drew on the poem when writing his
Metamorphoses, and *Antoninus Liberalis provides summaries of some of the stories
recounted in it.
NONNUS (probably fifth century AD), of Panopolis in Egypt, author of the
Dionysiaca, an interminable epic in forty-eight books that deals with Dionysos and
his expedition to India; translated in the Loeb series.
OVID (Publius Ovidius Naso, 70–19 BC), Roman poet who had an extensive knowledge of Greek myth and Alexandrian poetry. His most ambitious poem, the
Metamorphoses, is a collection of transformation legends in fifteen books. The poem
begins with the origin of the universe and ends with the apotheosis of Romulus,
and the intervening stories are skilfully woven together with regular alterations in
tone to ensure that it forms a unified epic-style poem. Except in the last two books,
which are devoted to Roman and Italian matters, the stories are drawn almost exclusively from Greek legend. Some were quite ancient while others originated in the
more recent literature, for transformations were a popular theme among Hellenistic
poets such as *Nicander. Most of the fictional letters in Ovid’s Heroides are addressed
from heroines of Greek legend to their lovers or husbands, and the poet also refers
to Greek myths elsewhere in his poems.
PALAEPHATUS (probably fourth century BC), author of the Incredible Tales (Peri
Apistōn), a mythographical work that provides rationalistic (if highly implausible)
explanations for the origins of seemingly impossible tales from heroic legend, for
instance those that involve monsters. The author, who may have written under a
pseudonym, was apparently an associate of Aristotle who was active in the latter
part of the fourth century BC; if that is the case, the book provides the earliest
evidence for a number of important legends. A translation and commentary is available, by J. Stern (Wauconda, Illinois, 1996). A similar work of later origin has been
transmitted to us under the name of Heraclitus. In contrast to *Euhemerus and his
followers, such authors did not attempt to rationalize divine myths.
PARTHENIUS of Nicaea (first century BC), late Hellenistic poet and mythographer, author of Sufferings in Love (Erōtika Pathēmata), a collection of prose summaries
of thirty-six love-stories, mostly obscure and of relatively late origin. In relation to
early myth, many are of interest for the way in which standard motifs from earlier
myth are recycled in them. Translations are available in the Loeb series and in J.L.
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Lightfoot’s recent edition of the works of Parthenius (Oxford, 1999, with illuminating discussions and commentary).
PAUSANIAS (second century AD), author of a Description of Greece in ten books,
covering the entire Peloponnese and much of Central Greece. Pausanias visited all
the main towns and other sites of interest in these areas to investigate their traditions and topography, monuments and antiquities, and cults and local mythology.
The resulting work is a source of the very highest value for the mythologist.
It records local traditions about the ancient history of the cities and lands that he
passed through, and many legends that were attached to local monuments and landmarks; and although it has to be remembered that he collected this local material
at a relatively late period, he also preserves a large amount of information that relates
unquestionably to the early mythical tradition, both in references to early literature
(for he was widely read and was willing to extend his reading to seek answers
to specific questions) and in descriptions of early works of art such as the mural
paintings of Polygnotos (fifth century BC) or the chest of Kypselos (sixth century).
For mythological purposes at least, the edition in the Loeb series is to be preferred
to the Penguin translation, which omits some heroic genealogies without any immediate warning and translates some Greek names into English in a haphazard and
confusing manner.
PHERECYDES of Athens (probably active in the first half of the fifth century BC),
early mythographer, a prolific writer who compiled comprehensive accounts of the
legendary history of Greece, drawing most of his material from early epic and organizing it on a genealogical basis in accordance with the procedure developed in the
Hesiodic Catalogue (see under Hesiod). These works of Pherecydes, which were
known as the Historiai or Genealogiai, were published by the Alexandrian scholars
in an edition in ten books, and were very widely consulted by scholars and poets
as a standard source for narratives from early legend. As we know from a few
surviving passages, the stories were recounted with pleasing simplicity in a naïve
paratactic style. Although no manuscripts of Pherecydes’ writings have been transmitted to us, we know a fair amount about their contents, largely because the
scholiasts refer to them with notable frequency. *Apollodorus cites Pherecydes
by name thirteen times in his little manual, more than any other authority, and
uses him as his main source in some sections of the book (for instance in his account
of the life of Perseus).
PINDAR (c. 518–438 BC), author of choral lyric, perhaps the greatest lyric poet of
ancient Greece. In addition to numerous fragments, four complete books of his
poetry have survived, consisting of odes that he wrote in honour of victors at the
four main athletic festivals, the Olympian, Pythian, Nemean and Isthmian Games.
These epinician odes (i.e. ‘odes of victory’) are of greater value as sources of myth
than might be supposed, for the poet rarely devotes many lines to the victory or
victor but soon passes on to a mythical narrative after a short prelude, and devotes
much of the poem to the myth before returning to praise the victor and his prowess
or good fortune at the end. His victory is most effectively ennobled by being
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presented against this mythical background. The myth could be introduced on a
variety of pretexts, typically in connection with the family history of the victor or
with the traditions of his homeland or the place of his victory. Although the narratives may be quite long, they are rarely developed in a straightforward chronological
manner as in epic poetry, for the poet tends to concentrate on particular aspects of
the story that are relevant to his ‘argument’, and to start in the middle of the story
and range backwards and forwards in time. Pindar recounts or refers to a great many
myths in his poems, and provides the first surviving mention or proper account of
many a story. Three full and relatively straightforward narratives may be singled
out by way of example. In his Seventh Olympian Ode, Pindar explains how the Sungod Helios came to win the island of Rhodes as his special domain (see p. 43); in
his Ninth Pythian Ode, he tells how Apollo abducted the nymph Kyrene to North
Africa as his mistress after seeing her wrestling with a lion in her native Thessaly
(see p. 152); and in his Sixth Olympian Ode, he describes the birth, exposure and
rescue of the seer Iamos (see p. 548). The oldest detailed account of the very ancient
myth of the Argonauts may be found in the Fourth Pythian Ode.
PLATO (c. 429–347 BC), Athenian philosopher and author of philosophical
dialogues. Although his writings cannot be said to be of any great value as a source
for myth (except perhaps in relation to the mythology of the Underworld and afterlife), they are full of mythological allusions and contain distinctive philosophical
myths of Plato’s own invention.
PLINY the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus, AD 23/4–79), Roman writer, author of
a Natural History in thirty-seven books, an encyclopaedia of the natural world that
records a vast amount of miscellaneous information.
PLUTARCH (mid-first century AD until after 120), author of biographies and of
essays and dialogues on moral, religious and other subjects. He quite often touches
on mythological matters in the latter works (which are known collectively as the
Moralia). The apocryphal myths in the pseudo-Plutarchean Greek and Roman Parallel
Stories and On Rivers should not be taken too seriously. A very useful life of Theseus
may be found among Plutarch’s biographies, but his life of Herakles is lost (which
would be more regrettable if we did not possess full accounts of that hero’s life by
Diodorus and Apollodorus).
PROCLUS, the author of some surviving summaries of the Trojan epics in the *epic
cycle. It is not known whether the Proclus in question was the Neoplatonic philosopher of that name (fifth century AD) or a grammarian of the second century AD.
QUINTUS of Smyrna (probably fourth century AD), author of a late epic poem in
fourteen books, the Posthomerica, which was written to provide a synoptic account
of the final stages and conclusion of the Trojan War after the poems of the *epic
cycle had ceased to be read (or at least fallen from favour). It describes all that took
place after the period covered in the Iliad, ending with the sack of Troy and the
perilous return voyage of the conquering army. Although Quintus would have drawn
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much of his material from fairly late sources, he was deliberately conservative in his
choice of sources, taking care to avoid novelistic or revisionist accounts. A translation is available in the Loeb series; although there are some attractive passages, the
poem as a whole is long-winded and artificial and does not often come to life.
SAPPHO of Lesbos (born late seventh century
of an intimate character.

BC),

author of lyric poetry, mainly

SCHOLIA, ancient explanatory notes preserved in the margins of ancient writings.
Since myth so often provided the subject-matter for Greek poetry and drama, many
of these are inevitably devoted to mythological matters, narrating myths to account
for allusions in the text in question, explaining specific points that arise from narratives in the text, citing parallels and variants from other sources (often from literature
that is lost to us), and so on. Most of what we know of early mythographers such
as *Pherecydes and *Hellanicus is derived from scholia. The scholia to the Homeric
epics and to Pindar, Euripides, Apollonius and Lycophron are particularly valuable
as sources of mythological information. Latin scholia can also be useful to the student
of Greek mythology, notably the scholia to the poems of Vergil and the Theban
epic of Statius.
SENECA (c. 40 BC–AD 65), Roman politician, philosopher and writer, author of
nine melodramatic tragedies that were based on stories from Greek legend and
modelled on plays of the Attic tragedians, especially Euripides, namely the Hercules
Furens, Hercules on Oeta, Medea, Phaedra, Oedipus, Thyestes, Agamemnon, Troades and
Phoenissae.
SERVIUS (fourth century AD), Roman scholar who is best remembered as the author
of a commentary on the poems of *Vergil. The longer version of his commentary
(known as Servius auctus or Servius Danielis) incorporates material from other authors.
These and other ancient notes on Vergil’s works contain valuable reports on Greek
legend, preserving some stories that are recorded in no other source.
SIMONIDES (c. 556–468 BC), lyric poet. Far less of his poetry survives than is the
case with his nephew Bacchylides and great successor Pindar, and little of what does
survive has anything to do with myth. This is a shame because he seems to have
had gifts of his own as a narrative poet who was capable of writing with great
simplicity and pathos. These qualities are shown to the full in a wonderful little
poem (543 PMG) in which Danae sings a sad lament to her sleeping baby Perseus
as they are drifting through rough seas in a little chest (see p. 239). We have to
rely in the main on scholiasts’ reports for an idea of how Simonides recounted
other myths.
SOPHOCLES (c. 496–406 BC), Athenian tragic poet, a contemporary of Euripides.
The most widely familiar of his seven surviving plays are those that portray the
sad fate of Oedipus and his daughter Antigone. In Oedipus the King (Oidipous
Tyrannos), Sophocles shows how it finally came to be revealed that Oedipus had
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unknowingly killed his father and married his mother; and the Oedipus at Colonus,
a very late work, portrays the last hours of the blind and exiled king of Thebes,
describing how he died in mysterious circumstances at Colonus (Kolonos) in Attica
after arriving there with Antigone as his guide. Antigone herself is the heroine of
the Antigone, which tells how she provoked her own death by attending to the burial
of her brother Polyneikes in contravention of a decree of Kreon, king of Thebes.
Two of the other plays of Sophocles are set in the final period of the Trojan War,
namely the Ajax (or Aias in Greek), which tells how the mighty warrior of that
name came to commit suicide after being defeated in a contest for the arms of the
dead Achilles (see p. 470), and the Philoktetes, which tells how the great archer of
that name was finally recovered from the island of Lemnos after being marooned
there by his comrades (see pp. 449–50). The Women of Trachis (Trachiniai) deals with
the events that led up to the death of Herakles, while the Elektra portrays the
predicament of Elektra, daughter of Agamemnon, at Mycenae after the murder of
her father. The action of the latter play is set at the time when Elektra’s brother
Orestes returns to avenge the murder. Substantial remains of one of Sophocles’ satyrplays, the Trackers (Ichneutai), have been recovered from papyri; it tells how Seilenos
and his crew of cowardly Satyrs tracked down the infant Hermes after his theft of
Apollo’s cattle.
STATIUS (Publius Papinius Statius, c. 45–96 AD), Roman poet, author of the
Thebais, a Theban epic in twelve books that tells the story of the conflict between
the two sons of Oedipus. He also embarked on an epic account of the life of Achilles,
the Achilleis, of which only two books were completed.
STEPHANUS of Byzantium (c. sixth century AD), author of a large geographical
lexicon, the Ethnica, which contained information on mythological and historical
matters. Although we possess very little of the original text, its contents are partially
preserved in a surviving epitome.
STESICHORUS (first half of the sixth century BC), Greek Sicilian lyric poet.
Although classed as an author of choral lyric, Stesichorus wrote long narrative poems
that seem to have had more in common with epic than with conventional lyric
poetry. Among the many mythical subjects that are known to have been treated by
him are the hunt for the Calydonian boar, Herakles’ theft of the cattle of Geryon
(probably providing the basis for Apollodorus’ account of that episode, see p. 264),
Eriphyle’s betrayal of her husband, the sack of Troy, and the revenge of Orestes;
but although his poems apparently exerted a considerable influence on the development of the mythical tradition, almost nothing is preserved of them. Stesichorus
himself became a subject of legend, as we will see (p. 583), for he was said to have
written a poem of recantation to win back his eyesight after he had been blinded
by Helen for insulting her in one of his poems.
STRABO (c. 64 BC–AD 19), historian and geographer, author of a surviving
geographical treatise in seventeen books. The bulk of the work is a descriptive
regional geography of the known world, compiled chiefly from secondary sources.
18

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Since Strabo is primarily interested in the world as a habitation for man and a setting
for human activities and history, he quite often has occasion to refer to mythological
matters in relation to the traditions and historical background of the areas that he
surveys. His respect for Homer’s authority encouraged him to include antiquarian
material. A translation with a good index can be found in the Loeb series.
THEOCRITUS (active in the first half of the third century BC), a Hellenistic poet
who is best remembered as the founder of the ancient genre of bucolic or pastoral
poetry, although he was actually more versatile than this might suggest. His poems
(apart from the epigrams) are traditionally known as Idylls, but it should not be
inferred from this that all are idyllic in the modern sense since the term could
originally be applied to poems that contained a wide range of subject-matter; one
of the finest of Theocritus’ idylls is a thus a portrayal of city-life in which two chattering women set off from home to attend a festival of Adonis, while others are
mythical narratives in miniature epic form. Idyll 13, the Hylas, tells how Herakles’
favourite of that name was snatched away by amorous spring-nymphs; Idyll 24, the
Herakliskos (Little Herakles), tells how the infant Herakles strangled two snakes that
were sent against him by Hera; Idyll 22, the Hymn to the Dioskouroi, tells how
Polydeukes confronted the brutal Amykos in a lethal boxing-match (see p. 386),
and then offers a rather unusual account of the conflict between the Dioskouroi and
the sons of Leukippos (see p. 529). From among the spurious poems in the
Theocritean corpus, Idyll 25, Herakles the Lion-killer, is worthy of mention, and others
too, genuine and spurious, are of mythological interest; Idyll 6, for instance, is a
pastoral poem in which two shepherds sing of the love of Polyphemos and Galateia.
We possess poems by two of Theocritus’ successors, *Moschus and *Bion, and there
is an anonymous poem of related type, the Megara, in which the wife and mother
of Herakles talk to one another of their sorrows. The poems of Theocritus are translated along with those of his successors in the volume in the Loeb series entitled
The Greek Bucolic Poets, and other translations can be found elsewhere.
THEOGNIS (sixth century BC), elegiac poet of aristocratic temper; almost 1,400
lines of verse, evidently of varied origin, are preserved under his name, but only a
handful are of mythological interest.
THUCYDIDES (died c. 400 BC), author of a history of the Peloponnesian War
which is the most impressive exercise in historical analysis to have been attempted
by any ancient author. The work starts with a short account of the earlier history
of Greece extending back into the period of legend (chapters 2–19 of the first book,
known as the archaiologia).
TRYPHIODORUS (probably fifth century AD), author of the Capture of Troy, a short
epic in 691 lines; translated in the Loeb series.
VALERIUS FLACCUS (writing in the latter part of the first century
poet, author of an incomplete Argonautic epic, the Argonautica.
19

BC),

Roman

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VATICAN MYTHOGRAPHERS, the name ascribed to the authors of three
medieval collections of mythical tales that are preserved in a manuscript in the
Vatican Library; the narratives are drawn from Latin scholia and late Latin sources.
French translations are available or in the course of preparation.
VERGIL (Publius Vergilius Maro, 70–19 BC), Roman poet, author of the Eclogues,
a book of pastoral poems, the Georgics, a poem about farming and bee-keeping, and
the Aeneid, an epic poem in twelve books that describes how the Trojan prince
Aeneas (Aineias in Greek) wandered to Italy after the fall of Troy and established
himself in Latium to become the ancestor of the founder of Rome (see pp. 588ff).
Vergil often refers to persons or stories from Greek legend, or borrows from Greek
legend or adapts it to suit his own purposes; and the surviving commentaries on
his works by *Servius and other scholars often refer to such matters as a consequence, and can be a valuable source for the mythologist.
XENOPHON (c. 430–354 BC), historian and author of prose treatises, mainly on
practical subjects; he rarely has occasion to refer to matters of mythological concern.

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THE BEGINNINGS
OF THINGS

‫ﱙﱚﱙ‬

FIRST BEGINNINGS

A

lthough conflicting accounts were inevitably offered of the origins of the gods
and the physical universe, Hesiod’s Theogony, an epic history of the divine order
composed in about 700 BC (see p. 9), came to be accepted by the Greeks as the
standard mythical account of the earliest history of the world; and we will thus
adopt it as our main guide in the first section of this book, while examining how
the world and the lesser and higher deities were supposed to have come into existence, and how Zeus and the Olympian gods attained supreme authority.
Before considering Hesiod’s cosmogony, it may be useful to picture how the world
was visualized by the Greeks in early times. They began with the notion that early
peoples generally seem to possess, namely that its real form corresponds to the form
that it appears to have when as much of it as can be viewed at once is observed
from their particular viewpoint. Now unless the observer is shut in between long
lines of hills like an Egyptian, or confined to an island or archipelago like the inhabitants of the South Pacific, the world might appear to take the form of a circular
disc, more or less level except where mountains or hills rise up from it, and capped
by the immense roof or dome of the sky. On the one side the sun and stars can be
seen rising above the horizon, while on the other they disappear at their setting;
and as they always rise on the same side, in the east, they must presumably make
their way back again, either under the ground or by some other hidden route. This
and no other was the earliest Greek picture of the world, presupposed by the earliest
legends and surviving inconsistently into later ones. More specifically, the Greeks
supposed that the boundary of this disc of the earth was formed by the stream of
Ocean (Okeanos), which was not an ocean in the modern sense but a great river
flowing around in a circle. The sky was envisioned as a substantial roof or dome,
sometimes said to be made of bronze or iron.1 It rose a considerable height above
the earth, but not an immeasurable distance. The residence of the gods was now
imagined as being the sky itself, now the summit of Mt Olympos on the northeastern borders of Greece. If one could pile three large mountains one above another,
as the gigantic Aloadai set out to do when they revolted against the gods (see
p. 91), it would be sufficient to form a ladder to heaven.2 The tale of Phaethon’s
21

— The beginnings of things —
ascent in the chariot of the Sun (see p. 45), to take but one instance, implies that
if one could travel far enough to the east, one would reach the place where the sky
touches the earth and the sun-god begins his ascent. Far to the west on the other
hand, where the sun goes down, there was a place of darkness, near which an entrance
to Hades could be found, as we will see in connection with Homer’s account of
Odysseus’ visit to the world of the dead (see p. 109). Hades was commonly pictured,
of course, as a murky realm that lay somewhere far beneath the earth, and might
thus be reached through one of the many deep rifts in the strata of the Greek rocks,
katavóthra as they are called in the native tongue, such as the famous one at Tainaron
in the southern Peloponnese. This is amply witnessed in the myths of Orpheus,
Herakles and other heroes who were said to have made incursions into Hades by
such routes whilst still alive.
It may be noted that Homer and Hesiod can speak of a place as lying beneath the earth and
at the edges of the earth as if there were no conflict between the two concepts. In stating, for
instance, that some monsters were confined beneath the earth by their father Ouranos, Hesiod
says that he ‘made them live beneath the broad-path earth, where they suffered anguish, being
set to dwell underground in the furthermost distance, at the bounds of the great earth’; or in
a passage in the Iliad, Homer speaks in similar terms of the banished Titans.3

Of the actual geography of the world, a differing amount was known, as might
be expected, in different ages. In the Homeric epics, Greece proper and part of the
coast of Asia Minor are familiar ground for the most part, but beyond that, little
enough is known. The more distant adventures of Odysseus are located in a fairytale realm, even if fabulous places on his itinerary came to be identified with real
places in the seas around Italy in the later tradition. To Aeschylus, some two
centuries later, southern Italy is familiar territory enough, but the interior of Asia
Minor begins to fade into the unknown and marvellous;4 and after the conquests of
Alexander, those who wanted a land of wonders had to go further again, to India
(see p. 579) or Northern Europe. Little was ever known about the regions of Africa
that lay to the south of the lands that fringed its Mediterranean shores.
Having this conception of the world in which they lived, the Greeks from quite
early times were interested in the question of its genesis; and it is natural that
Hesiod’s theogony, or account of the origins and successive generations of the gods,
should start with a cosmogony, to explain how the many-layered universe that forms
the seat of their rule came into being.
First of all, so Hesiod tells us, came CHAOS.5 This word, which seems literally
to mean ‘gaping void’, signifies something more than mere empty space; for Chaos
is a primal feature of the universe, a murky reality which will be represented in the
forthcoming genealogies as the source of much that is dark and negative in the
world. It is worth noting that Hesiod imagines it as something that is solid enough
to be affected by the heat of Zeus’ thunderbolt.6 When the universe is fully
constructed, it will be situated between Earth and the lowest region of all, Tartaros.7
Although chaos is a neuter noun in Greek, Chaos is treated as female in so far as it
is personified as a deity. It should be remarked that the word Chaos carried no
connotations of disorder or confusion in early usage.
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If Chaos comes first, she is followed by three other entities, first broad-bosomed
Gaia (Earth), the ever-sure seat of the gods, and then gloomy Tartaros in a recess
of the broad-pathed earth, and finally Eros, the personification of love or, perhaps
more accurately, of desire.8 Although it is quite often assumed that all three are
born out of Chaos as her offspring, this is not stated by Hesiod nor indeed implied,
for the emergence of Chaos and her three successors is described in a single sentence
governed by the same verb geneto (‘came to be’). Gaia, Tartaros and Eros are best
regarded as being primal realities like Chaos that came into existence independently
of her. Chaos will form a distinctive family of her own, as we will see, through two
children of hers who are explicitly stated to have been born from her.9
Of these four primal entities, two alone will be of genealogical significance, Chaos
and, above all, Gaia. EROS is introduced at this early stage because he is the motor
that will drive the process of mating and procreation that will bring everything else
into being. As a mythical agent, he could be pictured in a variety of ways, whether
as an ancient and all-powerful cosmic force as in the present context,10 or as a potent
force of nature who inspires all living beings with procreative desire, or as a mischievous boy-god (or even child-god) who pricks gods and mortals with his arrows to
inflame them with desire. Broadly speaking, he grows younger and more frivolous
as time progresses; he will be considered further in his nature as a god of love when
we come to deal with Aphrodite (see p. 196). It is harder to say why Hesiod should
have included TARTAROS among these first beings. He may perhaps have done so
because Tartaros is set so much apart from everything else in the world; for it will
be the nethermost region of the completed universe, lying far beneath the earth (or
in its very deepest recesses), at a lower level even than Hades. It is stated in a subsequent passage in the Theogony that Tartaros lies as far beneath the earth as heaven
rises above the earth, and that a bronze anvil cast down from the earth would fall
down for nine days and nights before reaching Tartaros on the tenth.11 Or according
to a comparable but somewhat different reckoning in the Iliad, Tartaros lies as far
beneath Hades as heaven rises above the earth.12 As originally conceived, Tartaros
served as a remote and secure prison for banished deities, and was wholly separate
from Hades, which was a home for dead mortals. In the course of time, however,
the distinction became increasingly blurred, and authors from Plato onward regularly use Tartaros as a convenient name for the region of Hades in which the
undeserving dead suffer posthumous punishment (see p. 120).13 The personified
Tartaros was occasionally named as a father of sinister children, such as Typhon in
the Theogony, or of Echidna and Thanatos (Death) in later sources.14
The next stage in the development of the universe commenced when Chaos and
Gaia proceeded to generate further children from themselves without contact with
any male partner.
Chaos produced a son and daughter by such means, EREBOS and black NIGHT
(or NYX in Greek).15 Night is far more important than her brother because she
will found the main branch of the family of Chaos by generating a dismal brood of
children from herself (see pp. 25ff); for the most part, the children and grandchildren
of Night will not be mythical figures of any substance, but rather personifications
of dark, destructive and negative forces. Erebos is a fitting brother for Night as a
personification of darkness, especially of the darkness of the Underworld; his name
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was used quite often from the time of Homer onwards as a poetic name for the
Underworld in its nature as a realm of gloom. He fathered two children by Night,
a daughter, DAY (or HEMERA in Greek), and a corresponding brother, AITHER,
who personifies brightness as manifested in the bright upper air.16 Although it may
seem odd at first sight that these radiant children should be born into this family
of darkness, it is really perfectly logical since Night and Day, and the dark and the
bright, are interrelated opposites that succeed one another. Brightness is bound to
enter the world, moreover, at a later stage than darkness because its emergence
marks a positive advance in the development of the universe. From the classical
period onward, Hemera was quite often identified with Eos (Dawn), the goddess
who brings the light of day.
If Chaos will become the progenitor of all manner of negative and harmful
forces through her daughter Night, Gaia will be the progenitor of all that is positive and substantial in the world, including the features of the physical universe
that have yet to emerge, and the deities who preside over every department of nature,
and all the great gods and goddesses. Gaia’s family will be built up in a different
way from that of Chaos, for she will begin by generating two male partners from
herself and then mate with them to found two separate lines of largely different
character. As the first and greatest of her self-generated children, she brings forth
‘starry OURANOS (Sky), equal to herself, to cover her over on every side’; and she
then generates two prominent features of her own topography that could be regarded
as being in some sense distinct from herself, the Mountains (Ourea) and the ‘barren
sea with its seething billows’ as personified in PONTOS or Sea.17 Gaia will take
Ouranos as her consort to found the main divine family from which the Olympian
gods and goddesses will spring; and she will found a smaller and more specialized
family through a liaison with Pontos, consisting mainly of sea-gods and nymphs
and beings of a monstrous or grotesque nature who needed to be set apart from
deities of the Olympian order.
To summarize, there were four primal realities, Chaos, Gaia, Tartaros and Eros,
which apparently entered existence independently of one another; and the two that
were of genealogical significance, Chaos and Gaia, prepared for the foundation of
the three great families of Hesiod’s system by generating children from themselves,
Chaos a daughter who would found a family through parthenogenesis, and Gaia two
sons with whom she would mate to found two families by the normal processes of
generation. Since the family of Chaos’ daughter Night occupies a place apart in
Hesiod’s scheme, we will begin with that before passing on to survey the two families that were founded by Gaia, the greater through her union with Ouranos, and
the lesser through her association with Pontos.
As was noted above, there were other mythical cosmogonies that followed a different pattern
from that of Hesiod. Night (Nyx) was elevated to a higher position in some, figuring as the
first being of all in one Orphic cosmogony, and as a member of the first couple with Tartaros
or Aer in schemes ascribed to Mousaios and Epimenides respectively.18 The Iliad refers, by
contrast, to a tradition in which the first couple were Okeanos and Tethys, two deities of
the waters (see further on pp. 36–7). Some of the most interesting and elaborate schemes
are those preserved in the Orphic literature (i.e. in apocryphal writings ascribed to the
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legendary singer Orpheus from the late archaic period onwards). A characteristic feature of
these was the world-egg from which a demiurge or creator-god – who was given various
names such as Phanes, Protogonos or Eros – was supposed to have sprung. Aristophanes
refers to the world-egg in a gentle parody of an Orphic cosmogony in one of his comedies,
the Birds: Chaos, Night, Erebos and Tartaros existed first of all when there was neither earth,
nor air, nor sky; and in the bosom of Erebos, black-winged Night brought forth a windegg from which golden-winged Eros (the demiurge) emerged.19 According to one scheme
from the Orphic literature, Chronos, unageing Time, existed first of all and gave birth to
Aither, Chaos and Erebos; and Chaos created an egg from Aither, from which Phanes or
Protogonos emerged, a bisexual being who then mated with himself to set the course of
creation in train.20 In the ensuing account of the successive generations of gods and their
conflicts, traditional matter from Hesiod was drawn in where appropriate.
The rationalistic cosmogonies that were developed by the early philosophers from the
sixth century BC onwards marked a new departure (though not an absolute break, since they
would not have taken the form that they did if it had not been for the influence of early
myth and of mythical patterns of thought). Starting from an undifferentiated archē or first
principle, for instance water or air, such schemes set out to explain in purely rational terms
how the various elements (aither, air, fire, water, earth) separated out and then how the fully
differentiated universe came to be formed from these elements.21 Features of the traditional
Hesiodic cosmogony were sometimes reinterpreted in the light of such speculations in the
later tradition. A good example of this can be found in the cosmogony at the beginning of
Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Chaos becomes a formless mixture of the elements or principles of matter, hot and cold, soft and hard, heavy and light. After this initial disorder was
resolved, by some god or some process of nature, the different elements separated out and
came to predominate at different levels in the universe, fiery aither in the vault of heaven,
and air below it, and earth at the lowest level of all, embraced by the waters of the sea.22
According to other reinterpretations, Chaos was identified with the primordial water or fire
(an idea supported by false etymologies that derived its name from cheisthai, to flow, or kaiō,
to burn), or was said to signify the empty space that must first exist if things are to have
a place to exist in.23 Much later, we still find traces of the classical cosmogony mingling
with accou