Greek Mythology List

Achelous is the prince of all rivers, the mighty god of the largest waterway in Greece, whose name was once synonymous with fresh water itself and whose voice was said to roar like a bull across the mountains of Aetolia. He is the shape-shifting suitor who fought Heracles, the hero forced to complete twelve impossible labors, for the hand of Deianira, princess of Calydon, transforming from man to serpent to bull and losing his horn in the struggle. He is the father of the Sirens, the bird-bodied women whose bewitching song lured sailors to destruction on rocky shores. He is the generous host who welcomed the hero Theseus, prince of Athens and slayer of the Minotaur, the bull-headed monster of Crete, into his watery palace during a flood and told him how the Echinades islands were born from nymphs who forgot to honour him. And he is the broken-horned god whose defeat gave the world the Cornucopia, the Horn of Plenty that overflows with fruit and flowers, the image that passed from his Naiads onto later coins, civic emblems and every later picture of abundance.

Achilles is the greatest Greek warrior of the Trojan War, the hero whose rage shapes the entire course of the ten-year siege of Troy. He is the son of the mortal king Peleus and the sea-goddess Thetis. Homer never names a vulnerable heel; the tale that Thetis dipped the child in the Styx and left that one spot dry belongs to later Roman storytelling, above all Statius, and it is that later image that made his name a word for fatal weakness. He is the champion who withdrew from battle in a fit of wounded pride, allowing the Trojans to push the Greeks back to their ships and burn them on the shore. He is the avenger who returned to the fight after his beloved companion Patroclus was killed by the Trojan prince Hector, cutting down Hector in single combat and dragging his body behind his chariot. And he is the tragic hero who died young, shot by Paris with an arrow guided by the god Apollo, a death the later poets fixed in the heel and that has stood ever since as the image of a single fatal weakness.

Acoetes is the helmsman who alone recognised Dionysus when his crew of Tyrrhenian pirates captured the god, the only man spared when the others were transformed into dolphins. He is the sailor whose decades on the wine-dark sea had taught him to read the weather of the divine in a stranger's eyes. He is the voice of warning that the pirates ignored, the old man who begged his captain to release the dark-eyed youth before it was too late. He is the witness who lived to tell the tale, first to Pentheus, the king of Thebes who denied the god's divinity, and then to every generation that followed. He is the priest who served Dionysus after the miracle, the mortal who passed from the deck of a pirate ship to the service of ecstasy. And he is the proof that recognition is its own salvation, the man who saw a god where others saw only ransom. Every warning unheeded, every old sailor's intuition that saves a ship, and every conversion born of terror carries the shadow of Acoetes.

Acrisius is the king of Argos who locked his own daughter in a bronze chamber beneath the earth because an oracle had sworn that her son would one day kill him. He is the father of Danae, the princess whom Zeus, king of the gods, visited as a shower of golden light that streamed through the ceiling and into her lap. He is the man who could not bring himself to murder his daughter and her infant son outright, so he sealed them in a wooden chest and cast them into the sea, trusting the waves to do what his own hands would not. He is the refugee king who fled his own city to escape the grandson he had tried to drown, only to meet that same grandson years later at the funeral games of Larissa. And he is the victim of the most inescapable prophecy in Greek myth, killed not by sword or spear but by a discus thrown wild at an athletic contest, a death so accidental that even fate seemed to be laughing at him.

Actaeon is the hunter who saw Artemis, the virgin goddess of the hunt, bathing naked in a forest spring and was punished so terribly his own hounds tore him apart. He is the son of Autonoë, one of the four daughters of Cadmus, the Phoenician prince who slew the dragon of Ares, the god of war, and sowed its teeth to create the first warriors of the land. He is the grandson of the dragon-slaying king who brought the alphabet to Greece, and the pupil of the centaur Chiron, the immortal creature who was half-man and half-horse and who trained the greatest heroes of Greece. He is the master of a legendary pack of hunting dogs whose names were recorded by the Roman mythographer Hyginus, fifty hounds bred for speed and ferocity. He is the victim whose death became a warning to every mortal who gazed upon the secrets of the gods, a tale told in tragedy, painted on pottery, and carved into stone across Greece. And he is the man transformed into a stag by a splash of divine water, his human voice lost, his mind trapped inside the body of the beast his dogs were bred to kill.

Actaeon's Hounds are the pack of dogs who tore their own master limb from limb after the goddess Artemis transformed him into a stag, the most terrible case of canine betrayal in all of Greek mythology. They are the fifty hounds bred and trained by the centaur Chiron, the wisest of all creatures, who also tutored the hero Achilles, the greatest warrior of the Trojan War. They are the dogs named individually by the Roman poet Ovid in a catalogue of thirty-six names, from Melampus the keen-scented Spartan to Ichnobates the swift Cretan tracker, each name describing a breed, a colour, or a hunting trait. They are the hounds driven to madness by Artemis, the virgin goddess of the hunt, or by Lyssa, the personification of rabies, so that they no longer recognised the voice of the man who had fed them. They are the pack that devoured Actaeon on Mount Cithaeron while he groaned in a stag's body, his human mind trapped inside, unable to call his own name. And they are the mourning dogs who wandered the hills howling for their lost master after the deed was done, a pack forever stained by the blood of the hunter they had loved.

Aegeus is the king of Athens whose name gave the Aegean Sea its title, the father who threw himself from a cliff in despair when he believed his son had died in the Labyrinth of Crete. He is the son of Pandion, the king of Athens who was driven from his throne by the sons of Metion, and the ruler who reclaimed the city and established his line. He is the childless monarch who travelled to Delphi, the sacred oracle of Apollo, the god of prophecy, and received a cryptic warning that he would die without an heir unless he loosened the wine-skin's foot only when he reached home. He is the man who visited Troezen and fathered Theseus, the hero who would slay the Minotaur, hiding his sword and sandals beneath a great stone for his son to claim. He is the king who took Medea, the sorceress of Colchis, into his court after she fled Corinth, only to watch her try to poison his son. And he is the tragic figure who stood on the clifftop at Cape Sounion and saw black sails on the horizon, leaping to his death and giving the waters below a name that would last forever.

The Aegis is the storm-shield of the gods, the most fearsome object carried on any battlefield of myth, a fringed goat-skin that raises tempests when it is shaken and routs whole armies with terror. It is the hide of Amalthea, the she-goat who suckled the infant Zeus in his hidden cave on Crete, taken up by the grateful god as both armour and emblem when he came of age. It is the sign of Zeus the Storm-Bringer, whose very title aigiochos, the Aegis-Bearer, made the object part of his name, fringed with a hundred golden tassels, each one worth a hundred oxen, ageless and undying. It is the shield of Apollo, who shook it over the Greek ships at Troy until their hearts forgot how to fight. And it is the breastplate of Athena, who set upon it the severed head of the Gorgon Medusa, the face that turns living flesh to stone, a gift from the hero Perseus, and wore it on every statue, every coin and every temple that ever bore her image. To stand under the aegis was to stand under the protection of heaven itself, and three thousand years later we still say it.

Aegisthus is the child of incest and vengeance, the son who was bred to kill a king and who spent his life finishing the feud that began before he was born. He is the infant abandoned on a mountainside and suckled by a goat, a foundling raised by the very man he was destined to murder. He is the lover who ruled Mycenae for seven years with Clytemnestra, the queen who turned against her husband Agamemnon while the great king was fighting at Troy. He is the murderer who struck down Agamemnon in his bath and slaughtered the Trojan princess Cassandra beside him, a usurper who held the throne of the House of Atreus through adultery and blood. And he is the man who was himself cut down by Orestes, the son of the king he had killed, dying in the same palace where he had committed his crime and bringing the generational curse of the House of Atreus one step closer to its terrible end.

Aeneas is the Trojan hero who carried his aged father on his shoulders out of burning Troy and sailed across the known world to found a new civilisation in Italy, becoming the legendary father of the Roman people. He is the son of the goddess Aphrodite and the Trojan prince Anchises, a demigod whom the gods saved from death again and again because he was fated to survive the fall of Troy and father a race that would one day rule the world. He is the warrior who fought second only to Hector during the ten-year siege, rescued from the Greek champion Achilles by Poseidon himself when the sea god lifted him from the battlefield in a golden mist. He is the reluctant exile who wandered for seven years from the shores of Thrace to the harbours of Carthage and down into the underworld itself, driven by a destiny he could not escape. He is the founder of Lavinium and the ancestor of Romulus and Remus, the twins who would build Rome upon the hills beside the Tiber. And he is the hero of Virgil's Aeneid, the epic poem that made him the embodiment of Roman duty, endurance, and piety, a figure whose bloodline the family of Julius Caesar claimed as their own.

Aeson is the rightful king of Iolcus who spent his reign in a dungeon while his half-brother sat upon his throne. He is the father of Jason, the hero who led the Argonauts in quest of the Golden Fleece, the magical ram's hide that hung in a distant grove in Colchis guarded by a never-sleeping dragon. He is the prisoner who smuggled his infant son out of the palace under the pretence of a stillbirth, trusting the wise centaur Chiron to raise the boy in secret on Mount Pelion. He is the aged man whose veins were drained of old blood and filled with a sorceress's brew, rising from a bronze cauldron with black hair and strong limbs after his son returned with Medea, the witch-daughter of King Aeetes. And he is the king whose restoration became the template for the murder of Pelias, for the same magic that gave Aeson back his youth was used to trick Pelias' daughters into butchering their own father.

Aethlius is the first king of Elis, the prize-winning son of Zeus who led the Aeolians out of Thessaly and founded a kingdom that would one day host the greatest games in Greece. He is the husband of Calyce, the daughter of Aeolus, keeper of the winds, by whom he fathered Endymion, the most beautiful man in the world, whom the moon goddess Selene loved so deeply that she begged Zeus to let him sleep forever rather than die. He is the king whose name, Aethlius, is built from the same Greek root as athlos, a contest fought for a prize, and whom later chroniclers made the first to set his sons racing. He is the forgotten founder behind the famous sleeper, the man who built the kingdom that his son would make immortal. And he is the link between the Flood that wiped out the old world and the Olympic tradition that celebrated the new, a bridge from Deucalion's ark to the running track at Olympia.