Greek myths have been retold for more than 2,500 years, and the retellings have drifted. These stories go back to the sources: Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, Ovid and the writers who collected the tales. You will meet a Zeus who was nearly tied up, a smith god thrown off Olympus twice, an Achilles who bleeds in the Iliad and a Pandora with a jar instead of a box, along with the myths behind gas, tantalum, mentors and NASA's Apollo.
Every tile in a Greek Mythology game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Gods
nine stories
1The day the gods tried to tie up Zeus
On the tile: Zeus
Zeus ruled Olympus, but in the Iliad he once came close to losing it. Achilles reminds his mother, the sea goddess Thetis, of the day Hera, Poseidon and Pallas Athena wanted to put Zeus in bonds. Thetis came to the rescue by calling the hundred-handed giant Briareus to Olympus. The giant sat down beside Zeus, and the frightened plotters gave up. Achilles then asks Thetis to remind Zeus of that old favor and beg him to help the Trojans, and she agrees to go.
Olympic torches are lit in front of the Temple of Hera at Olympia, and Hera had games of her own there. The ancient travel writer Pausanias described the Heraea: every fourth year, unmarried girls ran footraces in the Olympic stadium, with the course shortened by about one-sixth. The youngest ran first and the oldest last. Winners received crowns of olive and a share of a cow sacrificed to Hera, and they could set up statues inscribed with their names. Pausanias also noticed that one of the two pillars in the temple's back room was made of oak.
Athena and Poseidon once competed for the land of Athens, and the Athenians kept the evidence. Herodotus writes that a shrine on the Acropolis held an olive tree and a pool of salt water, said to be the tokens the two gods left during their contest. When the Persian army took Athens, it burned the olive tree along with the rest of the sacred precinct. According to Herodotus, the very next day Athenians who climbed up to sacrifice found a fresh shoot about a cubit long growing from the burned stump.
Poseidon did not take defeat well. At Argos, the story went, three river gods judged a dispute over the land between Poseidon and Hera and awarded it to Hera. In revenge, Poseidon made their waters disappear. The travel writer Pausanias explained that this is why those rivers carried water only after rain and ran dry in summer. Corinth told of another dispute, between Poseidon and the sun god Helios. The hundred-handed Briareus settled it by giving Poseidon the Isthmus and Helios the height above the city.
The Homeric Hymn to Hermes gives the god a busy first day. Born at dawn, he turned a tortoise shell into a lyre and was playing it by midday. That evening he stole fifty of Apollo's cattle, reversing their hoofprints and tying on sandals of twigs to hide his own tracks. When Apollo hauled him before Zeus, the infant insisted, "I am truthful and I cannot tell a lie," and pleaded that he was "born but yesterday." In the end he settled the quarrel by giving Apollo the lyre.
When Zeus and his brothers divided their father's kingdom, the underworld fell by lot to Hades. His realm was called the house of Hades, or simply Hades, so the god's name became the name of the place. He was not a devil. He ruled the dead sternly and could not be moved by prayer, but he did not torture the guilty himself; the Furies had that job. Worshippers usually used gentler titles, such as Pluton, "the Wealthy One," possibly because he gathered every living thing into his treasury at death.
The smith god Hephaestus falls from heaven twice in the Iliad. Once, when he tried to save his mother Hera, Zeus caught him by the foot and hurled him out. He fell all day and landed on the island of Lemnos at sunset, where the Sintian people tended him. Another time, Hera herself threw him out because he was lame. The sea goddesses Thetis and Eurynome caught him, and he spent nine years in their cave making brooches and necklaces. Later he repaid Thetis by forging new armor for her son Achilles.
Tragedy and comedy grew up at a festival for the god of wine. Britannica calls the Great Dionysia, held in Athens each March in honor of Dionysus, the festival in which tragedy, comedy and satyr plays originated. It opened with a procession that carried a wooden statue of the god to the Theater of Dionysus. In the tragic contest, three poets each presented three tragedies and a satyr play, which treated a heroic subject as comedy. The oldest tragedy that survives, Aeschylus's Persians, dates from 472 BC.
Before the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, Athens sent the runner Philippides, often called Pheidippides, to ask Sparta for help. Herodotus reports that Philippides said the god Pan met him in the mountains above Tegea, called him by name, and asked why the Athenians paid him no attention when he had often helped them. The Athenians believed him, and later set up a shrine to Pan beneath the Acropolis with yearly sacrifices and a torch race. His name lives on in panic, the groundless fear he was said to spread.
According to the mythographer Apollodorus, the Pythian priestess told Heracles to serve King Eurystheus and perform ten labors. Eurystheus then refused to count two of them. The Hydra did not count because Heracles had help: his charioteer Iolaus burned the stumps of its heads so new ones could not sprout. Cleaning the cattle yard of King Augeas did not count because Heracles had asked for a tenth of the herd as payment. Augeas then refused to pay anyway, so Heracles lost both the fee and the credit, and two more labors were added.
The Achilles with one weak heel is not Homer's. In the Iliad he is a mortal who can be hurt. The Trojan ally Asteropaeus, who could throw with either hand, hurled two spears at once, and one grazed Achilles's right forearm and drew blood. The Iliad does not even describe his death. The story of his mother dipping him in the River Styx turns up much later, in the unfinished Achilleid of the Roman poet Statius, written in the late first century AD. Even there, Thetis only wishes she had dipped him wholly. The poem never mentions his heel.
When Odysseus finally reached his palace, walking beside his swineherd Eumaeus, his old hound Argos was lying neglected on a heap of mule and cattle dung by the doors. Odysseus had raised the dog himself before sailing for Troy, and Argos had once hunted wild goats, deer and hares. Now, full of vermin, the dog knew his master at once. He wagged his tail and dropped his ears, but he was too weak to come closer. Odysseus looked away and wiped a tear. Then Argos died, having seen his master in the twentieth year.
With Odysseus gone for years, his palace filled with suitors. His son Telemachus counted 108 of them, not counting their servants. Penelope told them she would choose a husband once she finished weaving a burial shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes. Every day she wove at the great loom, and every night, by torchlight, she unraveled the work. The trick held for three years, until one of her women gave her away and the suitors caught her unraveling it. Antinous, a leader of the suitors, complained that she was crafty above all women.
On winter evenings the constellation Perseus still holds up Medusa's head, and one of the stars in that head is Algol, from the Arabic for "the demon's head." Every 2.87 days Algol fades to a third of its usual brightness for about 10 hours, as a fainter companion star partly eclipses it. It is often called Medusa's winking eye, but that is a modern myth. Old star charts put Algol beside her eye or on her forehead, and the first astronomer on record to note its dimming was Geminiano Montanari, around 1670.
After the Persian Wars, the oracle at Delphi told the Athenians to bring home the bones of Theseus from the island of Scyros. Plutarch says the general Cimon captured the island and, as the story goes, saw an eagle tearing at a mound. Digging there turned up the coffin of a man of extraordinary size, with a bronze spear and a sword beside it. Athens welcomed the relics with processions and sacrifices, as if Theseus himself had come home. His tomb became a refuge for runaway slaves and the poor, whose champion he was said to be.
Jason and the Argonauts sailed to Colchis to take the Golden Fleece, which King Aeetes kept in a grove guarded by a dragon. The Greek geographer Strabo passed along a down-to-earth explanation. Among the Soanes, a people living near the Caucasus mountains, it was said that mountain torrents carried gold down with them, and the locals caught it using perforated troughs and fleecy skins. That, Strabo wrote, was said to be the origin of the myth. It is an ancient theory, not a proven one, but it turns a quest into a mining story.
Atalanta's father abandoned her because he wanted sons, and a she-bear nursed her until hunters took her in. According to Apollodorus, she was the first to hit the Calydonian boar, with an arrow in its back. At the funeral games for King Pelias she wrestled Peleus, the father of Achilles, and won. Suitors who raced her for her hand had to run ahead while she chased them in armor, and any she caught paid with their lives. She was finally beaten by Melanion, called Hippomenes in other versions, who dropped golden apples from Aphrodite.
Odysseus got past the Sirens with wax and rope, but the Argonauts had a musician. In the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, the ship neared the island where the Sirens, part bird and part maiden, sang sailors to their deaths. As the crew was about to throw lines ashore, Orpheus struck up a quick, rippling tune on his lyre so their ears filled with his playing instead, and the lyre overpowered the Sirens' voices. Only one Argonaut, Butes, leapt overboard, and Aphrodite took pity and snatched him from the waves.
Homer spoke of a single Gorgon, but the poet Hesiod made them three sisters: Stheno, Euryale and Medusa. Only Medusa was mortal, which is why the hero Perseus could kill her. Her immortal sisters chased him, and he escaped by wearing a cap of invisibility that belonged to Hades. From the blood that ran from Medusa's neck sprang Pegasus and Chrysaor. Her snake-haired head, the gorgoneion, went on to become a protective charm, carved or painted on buildings, household goods and weapons to ward off the evil eye.
Cerberus, the watchdog of the underworld, usually had three heads, but the poet Hesiod gave him fifty. Snakes' heads grew from his back, and he had a serpent's tail. He devoured anyone who tried to escape from the realm of Hades and refused entry to the living. Orpheus got past him with music, and Heracles hauled him up to the land of the living. In Virgil's Aeneid, the Sibyl tosses him a honey-soaked morsel laced with sleeping drugs. That scene is why a sop, in English, came to mean something given to appease.
3The monster that became the biggest constellation
On the tile: Hydra
Heracles killed the Hydra, but in one telling the monster won more room in the night sky than any other figure. Hydra, the water snake, is the largest of the 88 recognized constellations, with its head on the border of Cancer the Crab. Beside it lie Corvus the Crow and Crater the Cup, and another legend explains why. Apollo sent his crow to fetch water in a cup, but the bird dawdled by a fig tree, waiting for its fruit to ripen. It returned clutching a water snake and blamed it for blocking the spring. Apollo saw through the lie, and snake, bird and cup now shine side by side.
Minotaur was really a description: the Greek Minotauros means Minos's bull. Ancient writers also gave the creature, with a bull's head and a man's body, a personal name. The mythographer Apollodorus calls him Asterius, and Pausanias calls him Asterion. King Minos of Crete shut him in the Labyrinth that Daedalus built. Pausanias reports that Theseus counted beating Asterion as his most noteworthy deed, and guessed why: escaping the maze made it seem the gods had brought him home.
In Hesiod's Theogony, the Cyclopes are three brothers, Brontes, Steropes and Arges, names meaning the Thunderer, the Lightning Flash and the Vivid One. Each had a single round eye in the middle of his forehead, and they gave Zeus his thunder and made his thunderbolt. Later Greeks credited Cyclopes with building as well. Pausanias called the ruined walls of Tiryns a work of the Cyclopes, with stones so huge that a pair of mules could not budge the smallest. Walls of giant blocks laid without mortar are still called cyclopean masonry.
The word siren is sometimes used as if it meant mermaid, but the Greek Sirens were part bird. In Greek art they appeared first as birds with the heads of women, and later as women with bird legs, sometimes winged. Only in later art and literature did they start to look like mermaids. Homer mentions just two Sirens; later writers usually made it three. In 1819 the French inventor Charles Cagniard de la Tour named a new sound machine the siren because it could make sound under water.
In the 1981 film Clash of the Titans, Zeus orders Poseidon to let loose the Kraken, and the city of Argos is destroyed. No ancient Greek would have known the name. The kraken is a sea monster of Scandinavian and Norwegian lore, described in detail by the Danish writer Erik Pontoppidan in his Natural History of Norway in 1752. The Greek word for a sea monster like the one sent against Andromeda was ketos, often written cetus in Latin. The same word survives in cetacean, the name for whales and their relatives.
Homer describes the Chimera as lion in front, snake behind and goat in the middle, breathing fire. In 1553, workers digging ditches for new fortifications at Arezzo, in Tuscany, unearthed an Etruscan bronze of the beast. It is shown already wounded, its goat head drooping and bleeding. An inscription on its right foreleg marks it as an offering to the Etruscan god Tinia. Duke Cosimo I de' Medici put it on display in his palace. The serpent tail was missing and was restored in 1785, biting the goat's horn, which differs from the original placement.
Egypt's Great Sphinx at Giza is a portrait of King Khafre on a lion's body. Sphinxes reached the Greek world around 1600 BC, already winged, like their Asian models. Then they vanished from Greek art for about 400 years, and when they returned they were almost always female. The Sphinx of Thebes, as Apollodorus describes her, had a woman's face, a lion's breast, feet and tail, and a bird's wings. Her riddle came from the Muses: what has one voice and becomes four-footed, two-footed and three-footed? Oedipus answered man, who crawls as a baby, walks as an adult and leans on a staff in old age.
Pandora's box was originally a jar. In Hesiod's poems, Zeus had the craftsman god Hephaestus fashion the first woman out of earth, and in the Works and Days she has a jar holding all manner of misery and evil. When she opened it, the evils flew out over the earth, and only Hope stayed inside, trapped when the lid came down. The jar became a box in the 16th century, when the Renaissance scholar Erasmus either mistranslated the Greek or confused it with the box in the story of Cupid and Psyche.
In Homer's Odyssey, Mentor is the old comrade to whom Odysseus left his whole household when he sailed away. When young Telemachus sets out to seek news of his father, the goddess Athena takes on Mentor's form and voice and sails with him. The name became an everyday word thanks to a French novel. In Fénelon's Les Aventures de Télémaque of 1699, Mentor is a principal character, and his speeches and advice fill much of the book. French turned his name into a noun for a trusted guide, and English borrowed it.
Atlas is often pictured carrying the Earth, but in Hesiod's Theogony he holds up the wide heaven with his head and arms, standing at the edge of the world. The book of maps took his name in 1595, when Gerard Mercator's Atlas was published a year after his death. It was the first collection of maps to use the word in its title. Mercator wrote that he chose it to honor Atlas, King of Mauretania, a learned philosopher, mathematician and astronomer, and his title page shows Atlas holding a celestial sphere.
In Hesiod's Theogony, the universe begins with Chaos, and it did not mean a mess. The Greek khaos meant a vast, gaping emptiness. In the 1600s, the Flemish chemist Jan Baptista van Helmont found that many reactions give off substances far finer than a vapor, and he needed a name for them. In Latin he wrote that he was calling this spirit, hitherto unknown, by a new name: gas. The word probably comes from khaos, since a Dutch g sounds much like the Greek kh. Van Helmont also identified the gas we now call carbon dioxide.
King Tantalus was punished in the afterlife by standing in water that drained away whenever he tried to drink, under fruit that pulled out of reach. His torment gave English the word tantalize, and in 1802 it gave chemistry an element. The Swedish chemist Anders Ekeberg named his new metal tantalum because its refusal to react in acid reminded him of the king's plight. For decades chemists confused it with columbium. In 1844 Heinrich Rose found a second metal alongside tantalum and named it niobium, after Tantalus's daughter Niobe. It later proved to be columbium.
In 1960, NASA's Abe Silverstein, who had already named Project Mercury, proposed Apollo as the name for the next crewed program. NASA's own history of its names notes that, most significantly, Apollo was god of the sun and pulled it across the sky each day in his golden chariot. The Greek sun god, though, was Helios, who drove a chariot from east to west every day and sailed back around the stream of Ocean each night in a huge cup. Apollo was increasingly seen as a sun god only from the fifth century BC.
Herodotus admitted he was stumped. No one knew, he wrote, where Europe got its name or who gave it, unless it came from the Tyrian Europa. That seemed odd to him, since Europa was born in Asia and never came to the land the Greeks called Europe; she traveled only from Phoenicia to Crete and from Crete to Lycia. He also wondered why the earth, which is one, had three names, all women's. Today Greece's two-euro coin shows Europa carried off by Zeus in the form of a bull, from a mosaic in Sparta.
Many retellings have King Midas turn his own daughter to gold. That scene is not in Ovid's Metamorphoses. There, the golden touch goes wrong at dinner: bread hardens in his hand and wine trickles through his lips as molten gold. The daughter comes from Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, whose storyteller calls her a girl "whom nobody but myself ever heard of" and names her Marygold. In Ovid, Midas washes the curse into a river by Sardis. That river was real: Herodotus described the Pactolus carrying gold dust through the marketplace of Sardis.
Homer's Iliad never shows the wooden horse. The poem closes with the funeral of Hector. The famous trick is told briefly in Homer's Odyssey and at length in the Aeneid, a Roman epic by Virgil. The Odyssey adds a twist: Helen suspected an ambush and tried to expose it by imitating the voices of the hidden warriors' wives, but Odysseus kept the men inside from answering. The horse was built by Epeius, a master carpenter and boxer. Since the late 20th century, its name has also meant harmful computer code in disguise.