Greek Mythology List

Cronus is the Titan who castrated his own father and seized the throne of the cosmos, the first king of the gods who ruled during a golden age of peace and plenty. He is the father of Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hades, Demeter, and Hestia, the six children he swallowed whole to prevent a prophecy that one of them would overthrow him. He is the devourer who was tricked by his wife Rhea into swallowing a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, the ruse that saved the infant Zeus and set in motion the war that would topple the Titans forever. He is the fallen king who was cast down into Tartarus, the misty pit beneath the earth, after ten years of war against his own children. And he is the namesake of Saturn and of Saturday, a figure whose reign still echoes in the Roman god of agriculture and in the word "chronology" itself, a reminder that time devours all things.

Ctesias is the Greek physician who served the King of Kings and came back with stories so strange that the ancient world never knew whether to believe him or worship him. He is the court doctor of Artaxerxes II, the Persian monarch who ruled the vast Achaemenid Empire from Susa to Babylon, who tended the king's wounds after the battle of Cunaxa and who used his position at the richest court on earth to gather tales from the farthest edges of the known world. He is the author of the Persica, a twenty-three-book history of Assyria, Media, and Persia that challenged Herodotus on every page and gave the Greeks their most detailed account of the eastern empires. He is the writer of the Indica, the lost book that introduced Europe to the manticore, the unicorn, the giant ants that mined gold, the dog-headed men, the one-legged skiapodes, and a hundred other marvels that would haunt bestiaries for fifteen hundred years. He is the man who claimed to have seen a living manticore at the Persian court, who said he had handled the horn of a unicorn, and whose name became a byword for both wonder and doubt. And he is the most important fabulist in ancient literature, a physician who treated bodies by day and fed the imagination of Europe by night.

The Cyclopes are the one-eyed giants who thundered across the Greek imagination, three brothers whose single eye in the center of their foreheads made them both terrifying and tragic. They are Brontes, the Thunderer, Steropes, the Lightning-Maker, and Arges, the Bright One, the first generation born from Uranus, the starry sky, and Gaia, the broad-breasted Earth, who forged the thunderbolts of Zeus himself. They are the master craftsmen who built the palaces of the gods, who crafted the weapons that no mortal hand could make, and who were imprisoned in Tartarus by their own brother Cronus until Zeus set them free. They are the monsters who appear in two very different forms: the divine smiths who serve Olympus, and the savage cannibals who devour Odysseus's men in the cave of Polyphemus. And they are the reason the Greeks believed that the most powerful forces in nature were born from the most monstrous forms, a legacy that still echoes in every cyclops who appears in fantasy and film.

Cyrene is the Thessalian princess who wrestled a lion with her bare hands and caught the eye of a god. She is the daughter of Hypseus, king of the Lapiths, the fierce mountain people of Thessaly, and of Chlidanope, a Naiad nymph of the river. She is the huntress who spurned the loom and the banquet hall, who slept little and rose before dawn to guard her father's cattle with a bronze javelin and a sword. She is the girl who, when a monstrous lion attacked the flocks on Mount Pelion, did not run for help but met the beast in single combat and killed it. She is the bride whom Apollo, the god of the sun and the lyre, carried off in his golden chariot to a land across the sea, where he founded a city and named it after her, making her queen of one of the richest kingdoms in the Greek world. And she is the mother of Aristaeus, the rustic god who taught mankind beekeeping, cheesemaking, and the cultivation of the olive, and of Idmon, the seer who sailed with the Argonauts and knew he would die on the voyage.

Daedalus is the master craftsman of Greek legend, the inventor whose mind could solve any problem and whose hands could build anything the gods imagined. He is the architect who constructed the Labyrinth, the vast maze beneath the palace of Knossos on Crete where King Minos imprisoned the Minotaur, a creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man. He is the father of Icarus, the boy who flew too close to the sun on wings of feathers and wax and fell into the sea that still bears his name. He is the fugitive who escaped the island of Crete by air when the sea was blocked, and the prisoner who was locked in the very maze he had designed because he knew its secret. He is the killer of his own nephew Perdix, whom he murdered in a fit of jealousy when the boy invented the saw, and the builder who raised temples and aqueducts in Sicily after his flight. And he is the man who outwitted King Minos himself, only to watch a king die in a bath at the hands of his hosts, a craftsman whose inventions shaped the fates of heroes and monsters alike.

Damis is the Assyrian disciple whose memoirs became the foundation for the most extraordinary biography of antiquity, the companion who followed a philosopher across the known world and wrote down everything he saw. He is the young man from Nineveh who met Apollonius of Tyana, the Neopythagorean sage who was said to possess the power of prophecy, invisibility, and communion with the gods, and who abandoned his home to follow the philosopher to India and beyond. He is the witness who recorded Apollonius's conversations with the Brahmans, his trial before Domitian, the Roman emperor who ruled with terror, and his mysterious disappearance from the temple of Dictynna on Crete. He is the author of the memoirs that Philostratus, the Athenian sophist who composed the Life of Apollonius of Tyana in the 3rd century CE, claimed to have received from Julia Domna, the wife of the emperor Septimius Severus. And he is the most disputed figure in ancient biography, a man whom some scholars believe was the genuine source of Philostratus's work and others dismiss as a literary fiction invented to lend authority to a philosophical romance, a legacy that makes him the invisible hand behind one of the most controversial books ever written about a holy man.

Danae is the golden bride of Zeus, the Argive princess locked in a tower of bronze who was impregnated by a shower of gold and gave birth to the greatest monster-slayer Greece ever produced. She is the daughter of Acrisius, the king of Argos who feared his grandson more than any enemy, and the mother of Perseus, the hero who beheaded the Gorgon Medusa and rescued the princess Andromeda from a sea monster. She is the prisoner who survived a bronze cell, a wooden coffin cast into the sea, and the unwanted advances of a king, and who lived to see her son turn his enemies to stone. She is the woman whose beauty was so great that Zeus himself could not resist her, and whose story proved that no tower, no ocean, and no tyrant could stop a child of the gods from fulfilling his destiny. And she is the only mother in Greek mythology who outlived every danger thrown at her, from her father's paranoia to a king's lust, and who watched her son grow from a castaway infant into the founder of a dynasty.

Danaus is the king who built the first ship in history to escape a forced marriage, then watched forty-nine of his fifty daughters become murderers on their wedding night. He is the son of Belus, the grandson of Poseidon, and the twin brother of Aegyptus, the ruler whose name became Egypt. He is the man who divided the world with his brother, receiving Libya while Aegyptus took Arabia, and who fled across the sea with his fifty daughters when Aegyptus demanded that they marry his fifty sons. He is the king who seized Argos from Gelanor by interpreting a wolf omen, who claimed descent from Io, the Argive princess turned white heifer, and who gave his name to the Danai, the Greeks themselves. He is the father who armed his daughters with daggers and commanded them to kill their bridegrooms, and who buried the severed heads of forty-nine sons of Aegyptus at Lerna. And he is the ancestor of Perseus, the slayer of the Gorgon Medusa, and of Heracles, the hero forced to complete twelve impossible labours, a lineage that made him the patriarch of almost every great hero in Greece.

Daphne is the nymph who became a laurel tree to escape the god who loved her, a transformation so famous that the laurel wreath still bears her name. She is the daughter of Peneus, the river god whose waters flowed through Thessaly, and a huntress so devoted to Artemis, the virgin goddess of the hunt, that she swore never to marry. She is the victim of Eros, the winged god of love, who shot Apollo with a golden arrow of desire and Daphne with a lead arrow of repulsion, setting in motion one of the most famous chases in all of mythology. She is the woman who prayed to her father as Apollo's breath warmed her neck, begging to be stripped of her beauty if it would save her from his grasp. She is the laurel tree whose leaves Apollo plucked to crown the victors of the Pythian games at Delphi, and whose wreaths would one day adorn the brows of Roman emperors and poets. And she is the eternal symbol of the flight from desire, the nymph who chose bark and root over surrender, whose story has been told by Ovid and remembered wherever the laurel grows.

Deianira is the man-destroyer, the Calydonian princess whose name means "destroyer of men" and whose single act of jealousy killed the greatest hero Greece ever knew. She is the daughter of Oeneus, the king of Calydon who offended Artemis and brought the monstrous boar upon his land, and the sister of Meleager, the hero who slew that boar and died for a woman's quarrel. She is the wife of Heracles, the hero forced to complete twelve impossible labours, the woman who won him in a wrestling match against the river-god Achelous and who bore him children while he wandered the earth in service to lesser kings. She is the jealous wife who sent her husband a shirt dipped in the blood of the dying centaur Nessus, believing it was a love charm that would win back his wandering heart. And she is the woman who watched from the walls of Trachis as Heracles screamed in agony on Mount Oeta, his flesh melting from his bones, and who took her own life rather than live with the knowledge that she had murdered the man she loved.

Demaratus is the Eurypontid king of Sparta who ruled beside Cleomenes I, was deposed through a disputed claim of illegitimacy and ended his life as a trusted adviser to the Persian kings. He is the son of King Ariston, whose doubts about the timing of his birth became the weapon used by his enemies to remove him from the throne. He is the co-king who opposed Cleomenes' interventions in Athens and Aegina and turned a political rivalry into one of the gravest constitutional crises in early Spartan history. He is the deposed ruler who fled through Elis and Zacynthus to the court of Darius I and received cities and lands in western Asia Minor as a Persian vassal. He is the exile who, according to Herodotus, warned his countrymen of Xerxes' planned invasion and later accompanied the Great King against Greece. He is the adviser who told Xerxes that the Spartans were free yet ruled by an uncompromising master, Law, and who warned the Persian king not to mistake Greek poverty for Greek weakness. He is the Greek king who watched Leonidas and the defenders of Thermopylae defeat the Persian army's expectations, then told Xerxes that every Spartan citizen was equal to the men who had just died. He is the ancestor of Eurysthenes and Procles, the dynasts of Teuthrania and Halisarna who preserved his family's Persian lordship for generations. And he is the liminal figure who stood between Sparta and Persia, king and exile, traitor and truth-teller, Greek adviser and servant of the Great King.

Demeter is the goddess who holds the power of life and death over every field of grain, every orchard, and every vine across the earth. She is the mother whose grief for her stolen daughter Persephone stopped the world from turning, plunging the earth into famine until the gods themselves begged for mercy. She is the founder of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the secret rites that promised initiates a blessed afterlife and drew thousands of pilgrims to her sanctuary near Athens for nearly two thousand years. She is the teacher who gave the gift of agriculture to the prince Triptolemos, sending him across the world in a winged chariot drawn by serpents to spread the knowledge of wheat and barley. And she is the fierce protector who nearly burned a mortal baby alive in her attempt to make him immortal, only to be interrupted by the child's terrified mother. Every harvest, every spring blossom, and every winter frost is a chapter in her story.