Curated playlist
Greek gods
- ZeusZeus is the supreme deity of the Greek pantheon, and yet even the gods rise from their seats when he enters the room. That detail, preserved in ancient sources, says everything about the order of things on Mount Olympus. He is the king who…
- CoeusLatona, that Titaness whom Coeus sired, whoever he may be. Ovid in Metamorphoses VI.185 poses this question about a figure who played no active part in Greek mythology. He appears only in lists of Titans such as Hesiod's Theogony 133 or…
- ApolloApollo carries more names than any other Olympian. He is the archer god, the healer, the prophet, the musician, the shepherd's patron, the founder of cities, the averter of evil, the lord of light. He was born on a floating island in the…
- DionysusDionysus stands as one of the most paradoxical figures in all of ancient Greek religion: the god who frees his followers from fear and self-consciousness, yet who also embodies ritual madness and the destruction of those who stand against…
- HephaestusHephaestus refused to come home. The Greek god of artisans, blacksmiths, and fire had been thrown out of heaven by his own mother, Hera, and his answer was to forge her a golden throne. When she sat on it, invisible fetters locked her in…
- HomerHomer is credited as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, yet no one can say for certain that he ever lived. He was possibly born around the 8th century BC. His life and his authorship remain obscure. Ancient Greek society revered him…
- CronusCronus, leader of the Titans and ruler of the mythological Golden Age, was the deity Greeks credited with bringing the harvest and feared for devouring his own children. He overthrew his father Uranus by castrating him with a stone sickle,…
- Uranus (mythology)Uranus is one of the oldest divine figures in Greek religion, a being so ancient and so vast that he was not a god who ruled the sky but the sky itself. In Hesiod's Theogony, the foundational text that Greeks came to treat as the standard…
- HeraclesHeracles, born Alcaeus and later known to Rome as Hercules, is the son of Zeus and a mortal woman named Alcmene. His birth alone was the product of divine manipulation: Zeus ordered the sun god Helios to hold off rising for three days so…
- CriusAncient Greek speakers used the word krios to describe a ram. The same syllables also formed kreios, which meant a type of mussel in that language. Scholars cannot agree on which meaning applies to this Titan. Some sources point to the…
- HeliosHelios, the Greek god who personifies the Sun, is invoked in one ancient ritual text with remarkable vividness: "a youth, fair to behold, with fiery hair, clothed in a white tunic and a scarlet cloak and wearing a fiery crown." The same…
- AdonisAdonis's earliest appearance in Greek writing comes from Sappho of Lesbos, around 630 BC. In a surviving poem fragment, a chorus of young girls asks Aphrodite what they should do to mourn Adonis. The goddess replies: beat your breasts and…
- PrometheusPrometheus is a Titan from Greek mythology whose name may mean "forethought" -- and whose story has never stopped being told. He defied the Olympian gods by taking fire from them and delivering it to humanity in the form of technology,…