Greek Mythology List

Clio is one of the nine Muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, and in later Classical and Hellenistic tradition she becomes the Muse of history. Her name is connected with proclamation and fame, fitting a goddess concerned with preserving what deserves to be remembered. Hesiod lists Clio first among the nine named Muses, while Calliope appears last and is called the chiefest. A later mythographic tradition says Aphrodite punished Clio for mocking her love of Adonis by making the Muse fall in love with Pierus; in that version Clio becomes the mother of Hyacinthus. The familiar scroll and book-chest belong to later artistic identification of her historical sphere rather than to Hesiod's original catalogue.

The Club of Hercules/Heracles is the first weapon the hero ever carried, the olive-wood cudgel that became as famous as the lion skin on his back and the bow on his shoulder. It is the club that failed against the Nemean Lion, the beast whose hide no blade could pierce, and yet served him through every other labor and adventure of his long and violent life. It is the weapon he used to smash the heads of the Lernaean Hydra, the many-headed serpent that lived in the marshes of Lerna, and to drive the man-eating Stymphalian Birds from their lake with a noise like thunder. It is the cudgel that crushed the skull of the triple-bodied giant Geryon, the shepherd-monster of the western isle, and that broke the bones of every bandit and tyrant who preyed upon the weak from Thessaly to Egypt. And it is the symbol that has outlasted every other attribute of the hero, the simple wooden club that appears in the hands of every statue, every coin, and every story of Hercules from archaic Greece to the modern day, a reminder that the greatest strength needs no edge.

Clymene is the Oceanid nymph whose marriage to a Titan produced the four brothers who shaped the destiny of the cosmos: Atlas, who holds up the heavens; Prometheus, who stole fire for mankind; Epimetheus, who gave every gift to the animals and left humanity with nothing; and Menoetius, whose arrogance earned him a thunderbolt from Zeus. She is one of the three thousand daughters of Oceanus and Tethys, the primordial deities of the sea, and she chose to marry Iapetus, the Titan of mortality and craftsmanship, rather than remain in her father's watery halls. She is the grandmother of the human race through Prometheus, the mother-in-law of Pandora through Epimetheus, and the ancestress of every hero who ever carried a torch against the dark. She is the woman whose sons fought on opposite sides of the Titanomachy, the war between the old Titans and the young Olympian gods, and whose family was torn apart by Zeus's thunderbolts and Atlas's eternal burden. And she is the silent figure behind the greatest acts of defiance in Greek myth, a mother whose children challenged the gods themselves and paid the price for it.

Clytemnestra is the queen of Mycenae who murdered her husband Agamemnon upon his return from the Trojan War, the most notorious woman in Greek tragedy and the pivot around which the curse of the House of Atreus turned. She is the daughter of King Tyndareus and Queen Leda of Sparta, and the half-sister of Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in Greece whose abduction by the Trojan prince Paris started the war that would destroy so many houses. She is the mother of Iphigenia, the girl whom Agamemnon sacrificed to the goddess Artemis to win fair winds for his fleet, and of Orestes and Electra, the children who would one day avenge their father's murder by killing her in turn. She is the wife who took her husband's cousin Aegisthus as a lover during the ten years Agamemnon was away at Troy, and who welcomed the returning king with a feast and a bath before striking him down with an axe or a sword, or in some accounts entangling him in a net like a beast before the blow fell. And she is the figure who, in Aeschylus's Oresteia, steps onto the stage as a towering villain in her own right, defending her crime as justice for a murdered daughter and a stolen throne, a woman whose name became synonymous with the danger that waits inside the home when the warrior finally comes back from war.

Cnidus is the Dorian city of Caria whose triangular peninsula jutted into the meeting point of the Aegean and Mediterranean, a place of extraordinary beauty that became famous for possessing the most celebrated statue of Aphrodite ever carved. It is the city founded by Dorian colonists from Lacedaemon in the 11th century BCE, who established themselves on the rugged Datca Peninsula and built a harbour that became one of the busiest in the ancient world. It is the home of Ctesias of Cnidus, the Greek physician who served at the Persian court of Artaxerxes II and who wrote the Persica and the Indica, introducing the manticore and the wonders of the East to the Mediterranean. It is the city that housed the Aphrodite of Praxiteles, the first life-size nude statue of a goddess in Greek art, so beautiful that men were said to have fallen in love with the marble itself. And it is the place where some said Aphrodite rose from the sea, a claim that made Cnidus one of the most sacred sites of the goddess in the Greek world, a legacy that still draws pilgrims to the ruins of her circular temple on the peninsula's edge.

Cockatrice is the later English name for the serpent-king the Greeks called basiliskos, the Little King, because even the mightiest serpents fled before the white mark on its head. It is the small Libyan serpent described by Pliny as no more than twelve fingers long, yet so venomous that its glance and its breath could kill, wither crops and split stone. It is not Medusa: its gaze kills, it does not petrify. The rooster-headed hybrid, hatched from a cock's egg incubated by a serpent or a toad, belongs to medieval bestiaries rather than to Homer or Hesiod. The King James translators used cockatrice for the Hebrew tsepha in Isaiah, and from there the name passed into English for the same crowned serpent. The Greek record for this creature is Basilisk; this page is the later name, not a second ancient monster.

The Colchian Dragon is the vast, sleepless serpent that guards the Golden Fleece in the sacred grove of Ares in Colchis. Pindar describes a dragon larger than a fifty-oared ship and has Jason kill it, while Apollonius of Rhodes gives the most influential surviving version in which Medea overcomes the unsleeping guardian with song, sleep and enchanted drugs. Pseudo-Apollodorus likewise makes Medea drug the dragon so that she and Jason can take the fleece. Its parentage also varies: Apollonius calls it an earth-born creature of Gaia, produced near the Caucasus where Typhon's blood fell, while Hyginus makes it a child of Typhon and Echidna. The dragon's story therefore preserves several endings and genealogies, but its central role never changes. It is the living barrier between Jason and the Golden Fleece.

Colchis is the kingdom at the eastern edge of the Black Sea where the sun rises over gold and dragons, the land that drew the Argonauts across the known world on the greatest quest in Greek mythology. It is the realm of Aeetes, the son of Helios, the sun god who drove his golden chariot across the sky each day, a king so powerful that he could yoke fire-breathing bulls and sow dragon's teeth that sprang up as armed warriors. It is the home of the Golden Fleece, the miraculous hide of a flying ram that had once saved the children Phrixus and Helle from sacrifice, and that now hung in a grove sacred to Ares, the god of war, guarded by a dragon that never slept. It is the kingdom where Medea, the priestess of Hecate and daughter of the king, betrayed her father, murdered her brother, and fled with a foreign hero, setting in motion a tragedy that would destroy Corinth and create the word "Colchian" for poison and witchcraft. And it is the land that the Greeks called the furthest boundary of the civilised world, a place of magic, gold, and danger that has outlasted every empire that ever claimed its coast.

The Cornucopia is the horn of plenty, a magical horn that fills itself with whatever food or drink its owner desires, a gift from the infant king of the gods. It is the broken horn of the goat Amalthea, the nurse who fed baby Zeus with her milk in a secret cave on Crete. It is the prize torn from the river god Achelous by the hero Heracles during a wrestling match for the hand of a princess. It is the attribute held by gods of abundance across the Greek and Roman world, from Demeter the grain goddess to Plutus the god of wealth to Fortuna the goddess of luck. And it is the symbol that still adorns Thanksgiving tables, state seals, and the halls of the United States Capitol, a horn that has been overflowing for three thousand years.

Coronis is the Thessalian princess who had a god's love in her arms and threw it away for a mortal man, the mother whose body became the furnace from which the greatest healer in Greek myth was pulled alive. She is the daughter of Phlegyas, the king of the Lapiths, the fierce mountain people of Thessaly who warred with the centaurs and produced Ixion, the man who tried to seduce Hera and was bound to a burning wheel for eternity. She is the lover of Apollo, the god of prophecy, music, and the sun, who lay with her in her father's house and filled her womb with a child who would one day raise the dead. She is the woman who, while carrying that divine child, took Ischys, the son of the Arcadian king Elatus, as her lover - a choice that Pindar called the madness of desiring what is distant while despising what is near. She is the corpse from whose burning body Apollo snatched the infant Asclepius, cutting open her womb as the flames rose around her, and she is the namesake of the crow whose white feathers Apollo scorched to black in his rage at the messenger who told him what he already knew. And she is the constellation Corvus, the Crow, set among the stars by those who could not forget that her name meant both "curved" and "crow" in the Greek tongue.

Crataeis is the sea goddess whose name means "Of the Rocks," the mother of Scylla, the six-headed monster who devoured sailors in the strait between Italy and Sicily. She is the figure whom Circe, the sorceress of Aeaea, told Odysseus to invoke when his ship had to pass the lair of her daughter, for only Crataeis could hold Scylla back from striking twice. She is the goddess of sea dangers, of the perils that lurk beneath the waves and between the cliffs, the personification of the rocky coasts that have shattered ships since men first took to the water. She is the mother whose child became the most feared monster in Greek seafaring lore, and whose very river in southern Italy bore her name as a warning to sailors. And she is the figure whom later poets identified with Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft and the crossroads, merging the terror of the rocks with the terror of the night.

The Crommyonian Sow is the man-killing beast called Phaea that Theseus destroys on his overland journey from Troezen to Athens. Bacchylides already includes the killing among the young hero's famous deeds, while Pseudo-Apollodorus says the sow was named after the old woman who bred it and records a variant genealogy from Typhon and Echidna. Plutarch preserves a rationalised alternative in which Phaea was not an animal at all but a violent female robber nicknamed the Sow. The creature therefore belongs to the same road-clearing cycle as Periphetes, Sinis, Sciron, Cercyon and Procrustes, but remains distinctive because Theseus deliberately seeks out a monstrous animal rather than merely punishing a human criminal.