Greek & Roman.

OpeningThe first stories Europe told.

No mythological system has been more relentlessly read, painted, sculpted, staged, and rewritten than the Greek. Two and a half millennia of European art assumes you know who Hera is and what Achilles did wrong.

This deck moves outward in three orbits. The cosmogony — Chaos, Gaia, the Titans, the Olympians — first. Then the cycles — Heracles, Theseus, Perseus, the Argonauts, Thebes, Troy — middle. Then the Latin reception — Ovid, Virgil, Apuleius — and the modern afterlife, from Botticelli to Madeline Miller.

The primary sources are few and fixed. Hesiod's Theogony (c. 700 BCE) for the gods. Homer for Troy. Ovid's Metamorphoses (8 CE) for the transformation tales. Apollodorus's Library (c. 2nd c. CE) for the comprehensive handbook. Everything else is variant, fragment, or vase-painting.

Chapter IFrom Chaos to Olympus.

In the beginning, in Hesiod's account, was Chaos — a yawning void. Then Gaia (Earth), Tartaros (the Pit), and Eros (Desire). Gaia bore Ouranos (Sky) and lay with him; their children were the twelve Titans, the three Cyclopes, and the three Hekatonkheires.

Ouranos hated his children and pushed them back into Gaia's body. She made a sickle of adamant; her son Kronos ambushed his father, castrated him, and threw the genitals into the sea — from the foam, Aphrodite was born. Kronos took the throne, married his sister Rhea, and ate his children whole as they were born — fearing one would do to him what he had done to his father.

Rhea hid the sixth child, Zeus, in a Cretan cave. Grown, Zeus fed Kronos an emetic, vomited up the swallowed siblings (Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Poseidon, Hades), and led them in the ten-year Titanomachy. The Olympians won. Kronos was bound in Tartaros. The new order began.

Chapter IIThe Olympians.

Twelve gods, fixed roles, fixed iconography. Zeus: sky and lightning, eagle and oak, father, serial seducer of mortal women. Hera: marriage and royal sovereignty, peacock, perpetually wronged. Poseidon: sea and earthquake, trident, horse-tamer, Odysseus's enemy. Demeter: grain and the seasons, mother of Persephone, the founding figure of the Eleusinian mysteries.

Athena: born fully armed from Zeus's head, civic wisdom, owl, olive, patroness of Athens. Apollo: light, music, prophecy, plague, the bow; Delphi is his oracle. Artemis: his twin, the wild, the hunt, the moon, virginity, women in childbirth. Ares: war as carnage. Aphrodite: desire and the trouble it brings.

Hephaestus: lame smith of the gods, husband of Aphrodite, who cuckolds him constantly. Hermes: messenger, trickster, conductor of souls, patron of thieves. Dionysos: wine, ecstasy, theatre, the late arrival who tears the social fabric and remakes it.

Chapter IIIHades and Persephone.

Hades drew the underworld in the lottery after the Titanomachy. It is not Hell — most shades simply persist there as bloodless wraiths, indistinct, a thinned-out continuation of life. Only the deeply guilty (Tantalos, Sisyphos, Tityos, Ixion) and the deeply favoured (the heroes in the Elysian Fields) get differentiated treatment.

Persephone, daughter of Demeter, is taken by Hades while picking flowers. Demeter blights the earth searching for her. Zeus orders the return; Hades feeds Persephone six pomegranate seeds; she is bound to spend a third of the year below. Demeter's cyclical mourning is the seasons.

This is one of the oldest and most influential myths in the corpus: the dying-and-returning vegetation deity, the mother's grief, the bargain with the underworld. The Eleusinian Mysteries — Greece's most important mystery cult, secret for nearly 2,000 years — were built on it.

Chapter IVHeracles.

Son of Zeus and the mortal Alcmene. Hera, persecuting the half-breed son of yet another rival, drove him mad; he killed his wife Megara and their children. The Pythian oracle told him to serve King Eurystheus of Tiryns for twelve years and perform whatever labours were assigned. The labours are the canonical hero-cycle of European myth.

Slay the Nemean lion (skin impervious to weapons; he wears it after). Slay the nine-headed Lernaean hydra (heads regrow; he cauterises stumps). Capture the Ceryneian hind. Capture the Erymanthian boar. Clean the Augean stables in a day. Drive off the Stymphalian birds. Capture the Cretan bull. Capture the man-eating mares of Diomedes. Take the belt of the Amazon Hippolyta. Steal the cattle of Geryon. Fetch the apples of the Hesperides. Bring up Cerberus from the underworld.

He dies poisoned by a centaur's blood that his wife Deianeira, deceived, smears on his cloak. His mortal part burns on a pyre on Mount Oeta; the divine part is taken to Olympus.

Chapter VTheseus and the Minotaur.

The Athenian hero. Son of Aegeus (or Poseidon — both, by some accounts), born in Troezen. He travels to Athens overland, killing six bandits along the way (the road-clearing labours). At Athens he volunteers for the tribute Athens owes Crete: seven youths and seven maidens, sent every nine years to feed the Minotaur — Pasiphae's bull-headed son in the labyrinth designed by Daedalus.

Ariadne, daughter of King Minos, falls in love with him and gives him a ball of thread. He kills the Minotaur with his bare hands (or a sword, in some versions), follows the thread out, and abandons Ariadne on Naxos on the way home. (Dionysos finds her there.)

Later: he descends with Pirithous to the underworld to abduct Persephone — they are caught, fixed to the chairs of forgetfulness, and Theseus is rescued by Heracles. He dies, in old age, pushed off a cliff on Skyros.

Chapter VIPerseus and Medusa.

Acrisius of Argos was told by an oracle his daughter's son would kill him. He locked Danaë in a bronze chamber. Zeus visited her as a shower of gold; Perseus was born. Acrisius set them adrift in a chest. They washed up on Seriphos, where the local king Polydectes wanted Danaë and disposed of Perseus by asking, impossibly, for the head of the Gorgon Medusa.

Perseus, equipped by Athena and Hermes (helmet of invisibility, winged sandals, mirrored shield, a sickle), sought out the Graiae and forced them to reveal the Gorgons' location. Medusa's gaze turned the looker to stone; he fought by reflection in the polished shield, beheaded her, and from her severed neck sprang Pegasus and Chrysaor.

Returning, he rescued Andromeda chained to a sea-rock, married her, and inadvertently killed Acrisius with a thrown discus at games — the prophecy fulfilled.

Chapter VIIJason and the Golden Fleece.

Jason, displaced heir of Iolcus, is sent by his usurping uncle Pelias to fetch the Golden Fleece from Colchis on the eastern Black Sea. He builds the Argo, gathers a crew of fifty heroes (Heracles, Theseus, Castor and Pollux, Orpheus, Atalanta), and sails through the Symplegades, the Clashing Rocks.

At Colchis, King Aeëtes sets impossible tasks. His daughter, the sorceress Medea, falls in love with Jason and helps him: she gives him a salve against the fire-breathing bulls; she puts the dragon to sleep; she sails back with him, killing her own brother on the way to delay her father's pursuit.

The story turns dark. In Corinth Jason abandons Medea for the king's daughter. Medea kills the new bride, then her own children by Jason. Euripides's Medea (431 BCE) is the great dramatic version.

Chapter VIIIOrpheus and Eurydice.

Thracian musician, son of the Muse Calliope, whose lyre charmed beasts and stones. His wife Eurydice died of a snakebite. Orpheus descended into the underworld and his music made even Hades weep. Persephone granted Eurydice's return on one condition: Orpheus must walk back to the upper world without looking behind him.

At the threshold, he turned. She was drawn back. He died torn apart by the Maenads of Thrace; his head, still singing, floated down the Hebrus to the sea.

Orpheus is the archetype of the artist whose art crosses the threshold of death. The story has been retold by Monteverdi (1607), Gluck (1762), Cocteau (1950), Marcel Camus in Black Orpheus (1959), and most recently Anaïs Mitchell in Hadestown (2019). The Orphic mystery cult — distinct from the Eleusinian — built an entire eschatology around the figure.

Chapter IXThe Theban cycle.

Cadmus founds Thebes by sowing dragon-teeth that grow into armed men. His descendants are cursed. Oedipus, exposed at birth because of an oracle, kills his father Laius at a crossroads and marries his mother Jocasta unknowingly. When he discovers the truth, Jocasta hangs herself; Oedipus blinds himself with her brooches and goes into exile.

His sons Eteocles and Polynices kill each other in a war for the throne. His daughter Antigone defies her uncle Creon's edict and buries Polynices anyway, knowing she will die for it. The Theban cycle gave Greek tragedy its richest material and gave Freud his foundational case.

Pentheus, another Theban king, refuses Dionysos's worship and is torn apart by his own mother Agave in Euripides's Bacchae (405 BCE) — perhaps the most disturbing surviving Greek play.

Chapter XThe Trojan war.

The judgement of Paris. Three goddesses, one apple inscribed "for the fairest", a Trojan prince asked to choose. He picks Aphrodite, who promises him the most beautiful woman in the world. That woman is Helen, queen of Sparta, married to Menelaus. Paris carries her to Troy. Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon raise an army of Achaeans.

Ten years of siege. Achilles, withdrawn over a quarrel with Agamemnon. Hector, Trojan champion, defending the city. Patroclus, Achilles's beloved companion, dying in his armour. Achilles's revenge, dragging Hector's body around the walls. Priam in Achilles's tent at the end of the Iliad, asking for his son.

After Homer: Achilles killed by Paris's arrow at the Scaean Gate; the wooden horse; the sack of Troy; Cassandra dragged from Athena's altar; Astyanax thrown from the walls; Andromache taken as a slave. The Greek tradition's unflinching gaze at war did not blink at the city's destruction.

Chapter XIThe nostoi.

The nostoi — the homecomings — were as important to the cycle as the war. Most went badly. Agamemnon returned to Mycenae and was murdered in his bath by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Their son Orestes, urged on by Apollo, killed his mother in revenge — and was hounded by the Furies until Athena established the first court at Athens to try him, in Aeschylus's Eumenides: the mythological birth of jury law.

Odysseus's ten-year wandering home: Polyphemus, the Lotus-eaters, Circe, the descent to the dead, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, Calypso, Phaeacia, the suitors. The Odyssey is the privileged exception — the homecoming that succeeds.

Menelaus reaches Egypt and brings Helen back to Sparta. Ajax, mad with shame after losing the contest for Achilles's armour, falls on his own sword in Sophocles. Aeneas, refugee from Troy, sails west and founds the line that becomes Rome.

Chapter XIIHesiod and the five ages.

Hesiod's Works and Days contains the canonical Greek philosophy of history. Five successive ages of mankind: the Golden race under Kronos, who lived without toil and died as if in sleep; the Silver, foolish and short-lived; the Bronze, war-loving, who destroyed each other; the Heroic, those who fought at Thebes and Troy; and the Iron, his own age, in which men "never rest from toil and misery by day, nor from perishing by night."

The Theogony is the cosmogonic register. Works and Days is moral and agricultural — its second half is a farmer's calendar, advice on sailing, prohibitions on urinating in rivers. Hesiod is the working corrective to the heroic mode of Homer.

It is in Works and Days that Pandora appears: fashioned by Hephaestus on Zeus's orders as punishment for Prometheus's gift of fire, sent to mankind with the jar that, opened, releases evils into the world. Hope alone remains inside.

Chapter XIIIOvid as transmitter.

Without Ovid, half of European art does not exist. The Metamorphoses is the late-Latin compendium that medieval and Renaissance Europe read as their handbook to Greek myth. Daphne turning to laurel as Apollo pursues her. Narcissus at the pool. Pyramus and Thisbe through the wall. Arachne the weaver, turned to a spider for outdoing Athena. Pygmalion and his ivory statue. Philomela and the loom. Actaeon torn by his own hounds.

The poem's principle is that the world's forms are unstable: a god desires, a nymph flees, the nymph becomes a tree or a spring or a constellation. Identity is conserved but body is contingent. Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid (1997) is the great modern English version. Stephanie McCarter's 2022 Penguin translation is the recent benchmark, restoring force to the violence Ovid did not soften.

Chapter XIVThe handbook tradition.

The Library is what survives of an attempt to systematise Greek myth: a flat, declarative, unliterary digest, organised genealogically. Olympian gods, then heroes by family. Without it the cycles would be much harder to reconstruct, since most full versions are lost.

Other handbooks: Hyginus's Fabulae (Latin, 1st c. CE), even drier; Pausanias's Description of Greece (2nd c. CE), a guidebook by a Greek tourist that is in effect a regional mythography organised by site; Diodorus Siculus's Bibliotheca historica, which euhemerises the gods into ancient kings.

For the modern reader these are reference works rather than reading experiences. Robert Graves's The Greek Myths (1955), with all its eccentricities about a White Goddess matriarchy, remains the most-consulted English mythography because it organises Apollodorus's material into something narratively continuous.

Chapter XVRome inherits.

Roman religion was older and more practical than the imported Greek myth. The numina — local spirits of place, action, and threshold — were the substrate. Janus at the door. Vesta at the hearth. Lares and Penates watching the household. The state cults — Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitol, Mars in his field — were civic obligations, not personal devotions.

Greek myth came in around the 3rd century BCE, through the Greek colonies of southern Italy and the post-Punic literary translation. The Roman gods were re-equipped with Greek personalities. Mars, originally an Italic agricultural deity, became Ares but more dignified and more central to civic identity (Romulus is his son). Venus became the divine ancestor of the Julian line.

The Roman attitude is well summed by Ovid himself: the Greeks gave us the stories, our task is to make them sing in Latin. Rome's contribution is the literary form, not the cosmogony.

Chapter XVIAeneas and Roman foundation.

Virgil's Aeneid (c. 29–19 BCE) gave Rome the foundation epic it needed. Aeneas, Trojan refugee and son of Venus, escapes the burning city carrying his father Anchises on his back and leading his son Ascanius. He wanders the Mediterranean, lands at Carthage, has the disastrous love affair with Dido, leaves her (she dies on a pyre, cursing his line), descends to the underworld, lands in Italy, fights the war that founds the Roman race.

The poem's politics are uncomfortable. Aeneas is pius — duty-bound — to a fault that costs every relationship he has. The final scene, where he kills the suppliant Turnus despite a moment of hesitation, has been read since antiquity as a deliberate question about the cost of empire. T. S. Eliot called Virgil "the classic of all Europe."

Translations: Robert Fagles (2006), Sarah Ruden (2008), Shadi Bartsch (2021).

Chapter XVIIRomulus and the founding.

Aeneas's descendant Numitor was deposed by his brother Amulius; Numitor's daughter Rhea Silvia was made a Vestal Virgin to prevent heirs; Mars came to her anyway and she bore twin boys. Amulius set them adrift on the Tiber. They washed up at the Palatine, were nursed by a she-wolf, and raised by the shepherd Faustulus.

Grown, they killed Amulius and founded a new city. Disputing whose name it would take and where its walls would lie, Romulus killed Remus. He populated the city by giving asylum to outlaws (the Asylum of the Capitoline) and by abducting the Sabine women. He vanished, possibly murdered by the senators, possibly translated to the gods as Quirinus.

The story is a foundational anxiety dressed as origin: fratricide at the wall, rape of the neighbours, asylum for fugitives. Livy's Ab Urbe Condita book I and Plutarch's Life of Romulus are the prose sources.

Chapter XVIIICupid and Psyche.

Apuleius's Golden Ass embeds the long inset tale of Cupid and Psyche. Psyche is so beautiful that Venus, jealous, sends her son Cupid to make her fall in love with something monstrous. He scratches himself with one of his own arrows and falls in love instead.

He installs her in a magic palace and visits her in darkness, forbidding her to look at him. Her sisters, jealous, persuade her he must be a serpent. She lights a lamp; a drop of oil falls on his shoulder; he wakes and flies away. She wanders the world performing impossible tasks Venus sets her — sorting seeds, fetching water from the Styx, bringing back beauty from Persephone — and is eventually reunited with him and made immortal.

The tale is the prototype of every "marriage to a hidden husband" story in European folklore: Beauty and the Beast, East of the Sun, the entire Aarne-Thompson 425 type-cluster. C. S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces (1956) is the great modern reworking.

Chapter XIXEleusis, Dionysos, Mithras.

Beneath the public Olympian cult ran the mystery religions — initiation cults that promised personal salvation rather than civic harmony. The Eleusinian Mysteries, built on the Demeter–Persephone story, were the most prestigious; Cicero, Plutarch, the emperor Hadrian were initiates.

The Dionysiac mysteries spread through southern Italy and into Rome (the senate suppressed the Bacchanalia in 186 BCE on grounds of public order). The Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii preserves a fresco cycle that may show an initiation rite — flagellation, unveiling, divine marriage.

The cult of Mithras was a Roman-imperial mystery (1st–4th c. CE), spread through the army; underground sanctuaries (mithraea) survive across the empire from Hadrian's Wall to Syria. Its iconography — Mithras slaying the bull — recurs everywhere the legions went. It was the major Late Roman pagan rival to Christianity.

Chapter XXWhat was here first.

The Olympian system arrived with the Indo-European Greeks around 1900–1600 BCE. Before them, the Aegean had its own goddess-centred cult, attested in Cretan and Cycladic figurines. Names that survive may carry that older layer: Hekate, three-faced goddess of crossroads and witchcraft; Demeter and Persephone in their chthonic aspects; Pan, the Arcadian goat-god older than Olympus; Cybele, the Phrygian Magna Mater whose self-castrating priesthood Rome adopted.

The Titans themselves are older than the Olympians inside the system: the Olympian theogony is, on its own showing, a story of generational succession in which the new gods overthrow the previous regime. The Titans Prometheus and Epimetheus, Atlas, Helios the sun, Selene the moon, Eos the dawn, all preserve a layer the Olympians do not erase.

Walter Burkert's Greek Religion (1977; English 1985) is the canonical scholarly account of these layers.

Chapter XXIThe painters' Ovid.

Greek myth re-enters European visual culture through Ovid in the fifteenth century. Botticelli's Venus rising from the sea is the first life-size female nude in Western painting since antiquity. Titian's six "poesie" for Philip II of Spain (c. 1551–62) — Danaë, Venus and Adonis, Diana and Actaeon, Diana and Callisto, Perseus and Andromeda, The Rape of Europa — define what mythological painting can do.

Bernini's Apollo and Daphne (1622–25, Galleria Borghese) catches the moment of metamorphosis in marble: her fingers becoming leaves, her toes becoming roots. Rubens, Poussin, Velázquez, Rembrandt, all painted Ovid. The history of European secular painting between 1450 and 1750 is largely a history of illustrating the Metamorphoses.

The Iconologia of Cesare Ripa (1593) and the various mythographic handbooks of Boccaccio, Conti, and Cartari supplied the iconographic protocols.

Chapter XXIIMyth on the tragic stage.

Athenian tragedy was a religious festival in honour of Dionysos. Each year three tragedians staged tetralogies (three tragedies and a satyr play) at the City Dionysia. Their material was almost entirely mythological — the Trojan cycle, the Theban cycle, the house of Atreus, the labours of Heracles.

Tragedy is where myth becomes interrogation. Aeschylus's Oresteia (458 BCE) is the only complete trilogy that survives — three plays following the murder of Agamemnon, the matricide of Orestes, and the establishment of jury trial. Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannus sets the canonical structure of recognition and reversal Aristotle would describe in the Poetics. Euripides's Bacchae, Medea, Trojan Women are the most sceptical and modern of the three — questioning the gods more than worshipping them.

Anne Carson's translations (Aeschylus's Agamemnon, Sophocles's Antigone, several Euripides) are the contemporary benchmark.

Chapter XXIIIThe 21st-century reworkings.

Greek myth has had three peaks of modern reception. The first is Goethe and the German Romantics. The second is the early-20th-century modernists — Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Eliot's Waste Land, H.D., Pound. The third is current and ongoing: a wave of feminist novels retelling the myths from the perspective of the women left out — Briseis, Penelope, Circe, Helen, Medusa, the Trojan women.

This wave began with Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad (2005). It has proven extraordinarily commercial — Circe alone has sold over two million copies — but it is also serious literature. Pat Barker's Briseis trilogy (2018–2024) is the best-realised of them.

Adjacent: Anne Carson's versions and reworkings (Autobiography of Red, Antigonick, Nox); Alice Oswald's Memorial (2011), an excavation of the Iliad as elegy; Emily Wilson's Odyssey (2017) and Iliad (2023), the first English translations of either by a woman.

Chapter XXIVTwenty-five.

• c.700Theogony & Works and DaysHesiod · GR
• c.700Iliad (Wilson trans.)Homer · GR
• c.700Odyssey (Wilson trans.)Homer · GR
• c.700Homeric HymnsAnonymous · GR
• 458OresteiaAeschylus · GR
• 429Oedipus TyrannusSophocles · GR
• 441AntigoneSophocles · GR
• 431MedeaEuripides · GR
• 405BacchaeEuripides · GR
• c.250ArgonauticaApollonius · GR
• 19 BCEAeneid (Ruden trans.)Virgil · ROM
• 8Metamorphoses (McCarter)Ovid · ROM
• c.150The Golden AssApuleius · ROM
• c.180Description of GreecePausanias · GR
• c.150Library (Hard trans.)Apollodorus · GR
• 1955The Greek MythsGraves · UK
• 1985Greek ReligionBurkert · DE
• 1990OmerosWalcott · LC
• 1997Tales from OvidHughes · UK
• 2005The PenelopiadAtwood · CA
• 2011MemorialOswald · UK
• 2011The Song of AchillesMiller · US
• 2018CirceMiller · US
• 2018The Silence of the GirlsBarker · UK
• 2022Stone BlindHaynes · UK

Chapter XXVWatch & read.

↑ Greek Gods Explained · an overview of the Olympian pantheon

More on YouTube

Watch · The Odyssey by Homer · Summary & Analysis
Watch · Roman Mythology Animated

Read about

Walter Burkert's Greek Religion (1985). Mary Beard's SPQR (2015) for the Roman context. Edith Hall's Introducing the Ancient Greeks (2014). Madeline Miller's Circe as the gateway novel. The Loeb Classical Library editions of Hesiod, Apollodorus, Pausanias for the primary sources.

Chapter XXVIWhy we still read these.

Three reasons the Greek myths have outlasted their religion. The first: they were committed to writing early, in two of the most powerful literary languages of the ancient world (epic Greek, hexameter Latin), and that writing was preserved and recopied through the medieval period in a way no other mythology's full text was.

The second: they describe a divine cosmos that is morally legible — gods with personalities, conflicts, jealousies, recognisable affairs. Not abstract principles. The Olympian world is a family, a court, a soap opera. That makes it usable.

The third, and the operative one: the stories themselves are first-rate. Achilles refusing to fight, Antigone burying her brother, Oedipus learning who he is, Orpheus turning at the threshold, Penelope at the loom — these are among the half-dozen best plots ever invented. Anyone who reads them, in any age, finds themselves used by them.

Chapter XXVIIHow to begin.

Three suggested entry points for someone new to the corpus.

Path one — through Homer

Read Emily Wilson's Odyssey (2017) first. Twelve thousand fluent lines, a fast read, and the entire shape of the heroic ethos in one volume. Then her Iliad (2023). Then the Aeneid in Sarah Ruden's translation. You will have read three of the five greatest Western poems in a couple of weeks of evenings.

Path two — through Ovid

Read Stephanie McCarter's Metamorphoses (2022). It is the broadest possible introduction to the cast: in fifteen books you meet most of the gods, most of the heroes, and most of the metamorphic stories that European art has lived off for two millennia.

Path three — through tragedy

Anne Carson's An Oresteia (2009), her Bakkhai (2017), her Antigonick (2012). Read in evenings, performed if possible. Then move outward to the rest of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides.