Curated playlist
Women of the Trojan war
- HeraHera is the goddess of marriage, women, and family in ancient Greek religion, and the protector of women during childbirth. She is the queen of the twelve Olympians and of Mount Olympus, the sister and wife of Zeus, and the daughter of the…
- AphroditeAphrodite, the ancient Greek goddess of love, has two birth stories that contradict each other, and the people who told them knew it. In Homer's Iliad and Sappho's Ode to Aphrodite, she is simply the daughter of Zeus and Dione. In Hesiod's…
- ArtemisArtemis was one of the most widely venerated goddesses in the ancient Greek world, and she contained contradictions that still puzzle scholars today. She was the protector of young girls and the patron of childbirth, yet she remained a…
- BriseisThe city of Lyrnessus burned under the torches of Achilles and his Myrmidons. Inside the smoke, a woman named Briseis stood among the captives who had lost their husbands and brothers to Greek swords. Her husband lay dead at the feet of…
- AthenaAthena leaped from the forehead of her father Zeus, fully grown and armed, and the gods stood awestruck. Helios, the god of the sun, stopped his chariot in the sky. Pindar wrote that she cried aloud with a mighty shout, and that the Sky…
- Rhea (mythology)Rhea handed Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, and he swallowed it whole. The ruler of the cosmos had just been deceived by his own wife. The infant he believed he had consumed was already hidden in a cave on the island of Crete.…
- ThetisThetis is a figure from Greek mythology whose power ran deeper than most mortals, or even gods, ever understood. She was one of the fifty Nereids, daughters of the ancient sea god Nereus, but that description barely scratches the surface.…
- ThemisThemis, the Greek goddess of divine law, had a name the scholar Moses Finley called "untranslatable." Writing about Homer's use of the word in the 8th century BCE, Finley found it could mean "right custom, proper procedure, social order."…
- EosEos, the Greek goddess of the dawn, rose every morning from the edge of the river Oceanus and scattered light across the sky before her brother Helios, the sun god, could begin his own journey. She is rosy-fingered, saffron-robed,…
- IphigeniaIphigenia told the assembled Greek army: "In peace and in good heart I offer you my throat." Those words belong to Euripides, but the story they capture predates any surviving text. She was the eldest daughter of King Agamemnon of Mycenae…
- Iris (mythology)The ancient Greek noun for rainbow also meant the halo of the Moon. An inscription from Corinth reveals an original form with a digamma that eventually disappeared. Scholars suggest a Proto-Indo-European pre-form exists, though some…
- Helen of TroyHelen of Troy was said to be the most beautiful woman in the world. Around the year 1604, the playwright Christopher Marlowe gave her the line most people still know. In Doctor Faustus, a character asks whether this was the face that…
- CassandraIn Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Cassandra cries out to Apollo: "God of all ways, but only Death's to me, once and again, O thou, Destroyer named, thou hast destroyed me, thou, my love of old!" She is standing outside a palace, brought there from…
- AmazonsThe Amazons were female warriors and hunters in Greek mythology, and the ancient Greeks never doubted they were real. They appear in the Labours of Heracles, in the Argonautica, and in Homer's Iliad. Commanded by a queen, they ran a…