Myths, Legends, and Other Minor Tragedies

Jason, the legitimate king of Iolcus, sets the voyage on his ship Argo to the foreign land of Colchis to get the Golden Fleece and prove that he is worth to become king. On the way, he encounters many troubles and delays. Even when he arrives in Colchis, he has to confront the deceptions of the local king. Theseus was a semi-mythical, semi-historical figure. The myth says that he had two fathers, king Aegeus of Athens and god Poseidon. As he descended from a god, he had super-natural powers.

The most famous labor of Theseus was the killing of the Minotaur in Crete Greece to relieve Athens from the burden to sacrifice seven young men and seven young women to this monstrous figure. After the death of king Aegeus, Theseus became king of Athens and legend says that his first wife was an Amazon. The myth says that the Amazons were a tribe of independent, mighty women who had rebelled against the male-dominated society and the atrocities of men. They used to live in isolate places, exclude men from their society and make wars against them.

Although there are no clear outcomes whether the Amazons really existed or not, they are frequently referred into myths and legends. The myth of Persephone, the sweet daughter of Greek goddess Demeter who was kidnapped by Hades and later became the Queen of the Underworld, is known all over the world. This is actually the myth of the ancient Greeks to explain the change of the seasons, the eternal cycle of nature's death and rebirth.

The myth of Persephone was very popular in the ancient times and it is said that her story was represented in the Eleusinian Mysteries, the most secret celebrations of ancient Greece. The myth of Prometheus holds a special place in Greek mythology. This son of a Titan was regarded as a great benefactor of humankind, the bringer of fire and the original teacher of technology and useful arts to the mankind. The great love he had for humans would often bring Prometheus into a dangerous conflict with Zeus.

In fact, it was Zeus who punished Prometheus into eternal torture for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to the people. The myth of Daedalus and Icarus shows us that the power of man has no limits but also that we should be very careful how to use this power. Icarus could fly with his wings, however when he flied too close to the sun, his wings were burnt and he fell to the sea.

The closest island where Icarus fell and got drowned took its name and it is called Ikaria till today.

Greek tragedy - Wikipedia

The myth of Perseus and Andromeda contains very deep wisdom on the interactions of male and female energy. Perseus is one of the greatest heroes of Mythology of Greece. He was the son of mighty Zeus and mortal woman Danae. He is best known as the slayer of the Gorgon Medusa, a fearsome monster, and as the rescuer of the Ethiopian princess Andromeda.

The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is a great tragic myth. Orpheus gets in love with nymph Eurydice and when she dies, right after their wedding, he descends to the Underworld. There he convinces the God of the Dead, Pluto, to allow his wife to come back to Earth so that they could lead a normal life.

This tragic story has inspired many painters and it is the basic concept for many operas and songs. The myth of Pygmalion and Galatea is very popular till today. Pygmalion, a famous sculptor, falls in love with his own creation and wishes to give life to his statue. This simple and imaginary concept is actually the basis for a psychological understanding of male behaviour and wish. This nice myth is considered as the depiction of the masculine need to rule over a certain woman and to inanimate his ideas into a female living creature. The myth of King Midas is a myth about the tragedy of avarice and narrates what happens when true happiness is not recognized.

Midas wished that everything he touched would turn into gold. However, he had not thought that this wish was not actually a blessing, but a curse. This myth is about a beautiful girl that was abducted and then seduced by Zeus, the chief of the Greek Gods. This concept is pretty usual in Greek mythology. The remarkable thing is that this girl became queen of Crete and gave her name to the entire continent of Europe. Her story has been particularly popular since the ancient times and has been depicted in many ancient pieces of ceramics and coins. Io was the beautiful princess of Argos in Peloponnese, who was seduced by god Zeus disguised into a cloud.

However, his jealous wife, Hera, learned about this relationship and turned Io into a cow to keep her away from her husband. Io was to suffer many misfortunes until she was finally turned into a woman again and have a normal life. The myth of Eros and Psyche is probably one of the dearest love stories in classical Greek mythology.

Eros was the personification of intense love desire. Psyche, a beautiful maiden, personifies the human soul. In fact, she is the symbol of the soul purified by passions and misfortunes and who is, from now on, prepared to enjoy eternal happiness. Leto in ancient myths of Greece was the representation of motherhood. Like every mother, she suffered a lot to give birth to her children and then to protect and raise them up in the proper way.

Leto suffered many misfortunes because of her relationship with Zeus, which caused Hera's jealousy and cursed Leto not to find a stable place on Earth to deliver her children. That is how Delos emerged, which was believed to be a floating island. Leto gave birth to Artemis and Apollo there and since then Delos became the sacred place of god Apollo. The story of Pandora came into prominence in "Theogeny", the epic poem of Hesiod, written circa BC. The myth dates back to the first centuries of humanity, just after the Titanomachy, the Great War between the Titans and the Olympians.

It is the story of a woman who opened the box where all the evils of the world were kept inside and thus she released every mischief for humans. The ancient people of Greece used to explain things they couldn't understand with myths. That is how they explained the creation of the world, natural phenomena or destructions or the existance of powers that could surpass human nature. That way, when they were looking at the sky and were observing all these stars, they would wonder what had caused these stars and constellations to exist.

In fact, many myths have been created to explain the existence of stars. The story of Callisto is such a myth, created for the sake of two beautiful constellations, the Ursa Major and the Ursa Minor. Adonis was the deity of plants and rebirth. He is known as a god who was for ever youthful, the one who would live and die only to be reborn again. The cult of Adonis comprised of women, as it is evident from the 2,year-old remains found on the island of Lesvos. The Athenian women planted the "gardens of Adonis" where the seeds would spring to life and then die to be reborn a few months later.

The Festival of Adonis was celebrated in mid-summer when fennel and lettuce were harvested.

Discover the most famous ancient Greek myths

According to the ancient myths, the Sun was put in a chariot and everyday God Helios would drive the chariot all along the sky. That is how the Sun would rise and set. Phaethon was the son the god Helios who secretly took the chariot one day to drive it. However, as he was young and inexperienced, he lost control of the horses and got killed. Asclepius was originally a mortal and later became the god of medicine and healing, according to the ancient Greeks.

The myth of Asclepius is connected to the origins of medical science and the healing arts. His cult was particularly popular all over Greece and people from all Mediterranean countries used to come to his temples, named Asclepieion, to be cured.

Remains of these temples can be seen till today. His story is pretty interesting and is actually a story of punishment. According to Hesiod, four primary divine beings first came into existence: The creative process began with the forcible separation of Gaea from her doting consort Heaven Uranus in order to allow her progeny to be born. The crudity is relieved, however, in characteristic Greek fashion, by the friendly collaboration of Uranus and Gaea, after their divorce, on a plan to save Zeus from the same Cronus, his cannibalistic sire.

According to Greek cosmological concepts, the Earth was viewed as a flat disk afloat on the river of Ocean. The Sun Helios traversed the heavens like a charioteer and sailed around the Earth in a golden bowl at night. Natural fissures were popularly regarded as entrances to the subterranean house of Hades —i.

From a very early period, Greek myths seem to have been open to criticism and alteration on grounds of morality or of misrepresentation of known facts. Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron. These races or ages are separate creations of the gods, the Golden Age belonging to the reign of Cronus and the subsequent races being the creation of Zeus. Those of the Golden Age never grew old, were free from toil, and passed their time in jollity and feasting.

When they died, they became guardian spirits on Earth. After an inordinately prolonged childhood, the men of the Silver Age began to act presumptuously and neglected the gods. Consequently, Zeus hid them in the Earth, where they became spirits among the dead. Zeus next created the men of the Bronze Age , men of violence who perished by mutual destruction.

At this point the poet intercalates the Age or Race of Heroes. He thereby destroys the symmetry of the myth, in the interests of history: This subjection of myth to history is not universal in Greece, but it is found in writers such as Hesiod, Xenophanes , Pindar, Aeschylus, and Plato. Of these heroes the more-favoured who were related to the gods reverted to a kind of restored Golden Age existence under the rule of Cronus forced into honourable exile by his son Zeus in the Isles of the Blessed. The final age, the antithesis of the Golden Age, was the Iron Age , during which the poet himself had the misfortune to live.

But even that was not the worst, for he believed that a time would come when infants would be born old and there would be no recourse left against the universal moral decline. Elsewhere in Greek and Roman literature, the belief in successive periods or races is found with the belief that by some means, when the worst is reached, the system gradually Plato, Politikos or quickly Virgil, Fourth Eclogue returns to the Golden Age.

Hesiod may have known this version; he wishes to have been born either earlier or later. There is also a myth of progress, associated with Prometheus , god of craftsmen, but the progress is limited, for the 19th-century concept of eternal advancement is absent from Greek thought. Myths about the gods described their births, victories over monsters or rivals, love affairs, special powers, or connections with a cultic site or ritual.

As these powers tended to be wide, the myths of many gods were correspondingly complex. Thus, the Homeric Hymns to Demeter , a goddess of agriculture, and to the Delian and Pythian Apollo describe how these deities came to be associated with sites at Eleusis , Delos , and Delphi , respectively.

Greek mythology

Poseidon god of the sea was unusually atavistic in that his union with Earth, and his equine adventures appear to hark back to his pre-marine status as a horse or earthquake god. Many myths are treated as trivial and lighthearted, but this judgment rests on the suppressed premise that any divine behaviour that seems inappropriate for a major religion must have seemed absurd and fictitious to the Greeks.

As time went on, an accretion of minor myths continued to supplement the older and more authentic ones. Such etiological myths proliferated during the Hellenistic era, though in the earlier periods genuine examples are harder to detect. Of folk deities, the nymphs nature goddesses personified nature or the life in water or trees and were said to punish unfaithful lovers.

Water nymphs Naiads were reputed to drown those with whom they fell in love, such as Hylas , a companion of Heracles. Even the gentle Muses goddesses of the arts and sciences blinded their human rivals, such as the bard Thamyris. Like sea deities, sileni possessed secret knowledge that they would reveal only under duress.

Charon , the grisly ferryman of the dead, was also a popular figure of folktale. Hero myths included elements from tradition, folktale, and fiction. The saga of the Argonauts , for example, is highly complex and includes elements from folktale and fiction. Even heroes like Achilles , Hector , or Diomedes are largely fictional, though doubtlessly based on legendary prototypes. The Odyssey is the prime example of the wholesale importation of folktales into epic. All the best-known Greek hero myths, such as the labours of Heracles and the adventures of Perseus , Cadmus , Pelops , or Oedipus, depend more for their interest on folktales than on legend.

Certain heroes—Heracles, the Dioscuri the twins Castor and Pollux , Amphiaraus one of the Argonauts , and Hyacinthus a youth whom Apollo loved and accidentally killed —may be regarded as partly legend and partly religious myth. Thus, whereas Heracles , a man of Tiryns, may originally have been a historical character, the myth of his demise on Oeta and subsequent elevation to full divinity is closely linked with a cult.

Similarly, the exploits of the Dioscuri are those of typical heroes: After their death they passed six months alternately beneath the Earth and in the world above, which suggests that their worship , like that of Persephone the daughter of Zeus and Demeter , was connected with fertility or seasonal change. Certain myths, in which goddesses or heroes were temporarily incarcerated in the underworld, were allegories of seasonal renewal. Perhaps the best-known myth of this type is the one that tells how Hades Latin Pluto , the god of the underworld, carried Persephone off to be his consort, causing her mother, Demeter , the goddess of grain, to allow the earth to grow barren out of her grief.

In less benign climates, she was said to spend six months of the year in each. Myths of seasonal renewal, in which the deity dies and returns to life at particular times of the year, are plentiful. An important Greek example is the Cretan Zeus, mentioned above. Many Greek myths involve animal transformations, though there is no proof that theriolatry animal worship was ever practiced by the Greeks.

Gods sometimes assumed the form of beasts in order to deceive goddesses or women. Zeus , for example, assumed the form of a bull when he carried off Europa , a Phoenician princess, and he appeared in the guise of a swan in order to attract Leda , wife of a king of Sparta. Poseidon took the shape of a stallion to beget the wonder horses Arion and Pegasus. These myths do not suggest theriolatry. No worship is offered to the deity concerned. The animals serve other purposes in the narratives. Bulls were the most powerful animals known to the Greeks and may have been worshipped in the remote past.

Other types of myth exemplified the belief that the gods sometimes appeared on Earth disguised as men and women and rewarded any help or hospitality offered them. Baucis, an old Phrygian woman, and Philemon , her husband, for example, were saved from a flood by offering hospitality to Zeus and Hermes, both of whom were in human form.

Similar to such stories are the moral tales about the fate of Icarus , who flew too high on homemade wings, or the myth about Phaethon , the son of Helios, who failed to perform a task too great for him controlling the horses of the chariot of the Sun. Also popular were myths of fairylands, such as the Garden of the Hesperides in the far west or the land of the Hyperboreans in the far north , or encounters with unusual creatures, such as the Centaurs, or distinctive societies, such as the Amazons.

Western people of all eras have been moved and baffled by the deceptive simplicity of Greek myths, and Greek mythology has had a profound effect on the development of Western civilization. The earliest visual representations of mythological characters and motifs occur in late Mycenaean and sub-Mycenaean art.

Mythological and epic themes are also found in Geometric art of the 8th century bce , but not until the 7th century did such themes become popular in both ceramic and sculptured works. During the Classical and subsequent periods, they became commonplace. The birth of Athena was the subject of the east pediment of the Parthenon in Athens, and the legend of Pelops and of the labours of Heracles were the subjects of the corresponding pediment and the metopes a space on a Doric frieze of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia.

The battles of gods with Giants and of Lapiths a wild race in northern Greece with Centaurs were also favourite motifs. Pompeian frescoes reveal realistic representations of Theseus and Ariadne , Perseus, the fall of Icarus, and the death of Pyramus. The great Renaissance masters added a new dimension to Greek mythology. The German composers Christoph Gluck 18th century and Richard Strauss 20th century , the German-French composer Jacques Offenbach 19th century , the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky 20th century , and many others have set Greek mythological themes to music.

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