Antiquity History

Deep Dive · Ancient Greece

Greek Mythology: Gods, Heroes, and Legends

Greek mythology is the most influential body of fictional narrative in the Western tradition. The stories of Zeus and the Twelve Olympians, of Heracles and his Twelve Labors, of Odysseus’s long journey home in the Odyssey, of Achilles’s wrath in the Iliad, of the Trojan War and the fall of Troy — these were the foundational stories of the Greek world, and through the Romans and the Christian Middle Ages they have remained foundational in the modern West.

This cluster page is an introduction to the Greek mythological universe. It covers the gods, the heroes, the great cycles of myth, and the way the stories were told and re-told. It links out to deep dives on the Twelve Olympians, the Twelve Labors of Heracles, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Trojan War.

The Greek Gods

The Greeks believed in a large, complicated family of gods who lived on Mount Olympus, the highest peak in Greece, and on the other holy mountains of the Greek world. The most important gods were the Twelve Olympians, led by Zeus, the sky-god and father of gods and men.

You can read the full list in The Twelve Olympians: Complete Guide. The most important were:

The Titans and the Origin of the World

Before the Olympians, the Greeks believed, the world had been ruled by the Titans, led by Cronos. According to Hesiod’s Theogony, written around 700 BCE, the cosmos had emerged out of Chaos. From Chaos came Gaia (Earth), Tartarus (the underworld pit), Eros (desire), Erebus (Darkness), and Nyx (Night). Gaia gave birth to Uranus (Sky), and the union of Earth and Sky produced the Titans, the Cyclopes, and the Hecatoncheires (hundred-handed giants).

Cronos, the youngest Titan, castrated his father Uranus at the urging of his mother Gaia, and the castrated blood gave birth to the Furies and the Giants. Cronos married his sister Rhea, and they produced the first generation of Olympians — Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus. Cronos, fearing that one of his children would overthrow him as he had overthrown his father, swallowed each of them at birth. Rhea hid the infant Zeus in a cave on Crete, gave Cronos a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes to swallow instead, and Zeus, grown to manhood, returned to give his father an emetic and free his siblings. The Olympians then waged a ten-year war against the Titans — the Titanomachy — and finally triumphed, imprisoning most of the Titans in Tartarus.

The Greek Heroes

Greek myth is also a mythology of heroes — the great warriors and demigods who lived one generation before or after the Trojan War. The most famous are:

The Great Cycles of Greek Myth

Greek myth is organized into a small number of great cycles of stories, each centered on a city, a family, or a single hero.

The Trojan Cycle

The central cycle is the Trojan War and its aftermath. The war was supposedly fought over Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, whom the Trojan prince Paris stole from her Greek husband, Menelaus. A coalition of Greek kings — Agamemnon, Achilles, Odysseus, Ajax, Diomedes, Nestor, Idomeneus, and others — gathered a thousand ships, sailed to Troy, and after ten years of siege finally took the city by the stratagem of the Trojan Horse.

The cycle includes the Cypria (the events leading up to the war), the Iliad (Achilles’ wrath in the tenth year), the Aethiopis and Little Iliad (the final events of the war), the Sack of Ilium (the fall of Troy), and the Returns and Odyssey (the homecomings of the Greek heroes).

The Theban Cycle

The second great cycle centers on the city of Thebes in central Greece. Oedipus, the king who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother, is at the heart of it. The cycle includes the Seven against Thebes, the war of the Epigoni, and the story of Antigone.

The Argonautic Cycle

The story of Jason and the Argonauts, who sailed on the ship Argo to recover the Golden Fleece from the kingdom of Aeetes at the far end of the Black Sea. The journey took them past the Clashing Rocks, the Harpies, the Amazons, and many other marvels. Medea, the sorceress daughter of Aeetes, fell in love with Jason and helped him win the Fleece; her story, and the terrible things that happen to her and Jason afterward, is one of the great tragic arcs of Greek myth.

The Heraclean Cycle

The cycle of the Twelve Labors of Heracles, and the many other adventures of the strongest man who ever lived. Heracles was the son of Zeus by the mortal woman Alcmene; Hera, Zeus’s wife, persecuted him from birth, and most of his life was marked by the difficult tasks she set him.

Sources

Most of what we know about Greek myth comes from a relatively small set of literary sources, written between the eighth and the fifth centuries BCE. The most important are:

Greek Myth in the Roman and Christian Worlds

The Romans adopted the Greek gods, often under new names (Zeus became Jupiter, Hera became Juno, Ares became Mars, Aphrodite became Venus, and so on), and Roman poets like Ovid and Virgil retold the Greek myths in Latin. When the Roman Empire became Christian, the old gods were demonized and the old stories were either banned or allegorized. But they survived: in the works of the late-antique poet Nonnus, in medieval handbooks, in the paintings of the Renaissance, and in the literature of the modern period. The Greek myths are, quite simply, still with us.