Greek Mythology List

Hector is the crown prince of Troy and the greatest warrior ever to defend its walls, the man who held back the Greek armies for ten years while his brother Paris dallied with Helen in the palace. He is the breaker of horses who led the Trojan charge against the Greek ships, burning them on the beach and driving the invaders back to the sea. He is the husband of Andromache, the Cilician princess whose name means "man-fighter," and the father of Astyanax, the little boy whose very name -- "Lord of the City" -- proclaimed him heir to a doomed throne. He is the killer of Patroclus, the beloved companion of Achilles, whose death in battle unleashed a fury so terrible that even the gods trembled to behold it. He is the man who ran three times around the walls of his own city, chased by the greatest warrior who ever lived, until the goddess Athena tricked him into standing his ground. And he is the corpse that Achilles dragged behind his chariot for twelve days, yet whose body the gods themselves preserved from decay, so that even in death he retained the dignity he had shown in life.

Hecuba is the queen of Troy who watched her city burn and her children die one by one, the mother who outlived her kingdom and became a slave in the land that destroyed her. She is the wife of Priam, the last king of Troy, and the mother of Hector, the greatest warrior the Trojans ever fielded, and of Paris, the prince whose abduction of Helen sparked the war that consumed ten years and a thousand ships. She is the mother of Cassandra, the prophetess cursed by Apollo so that no one would ever believe her warnings, and of Polyxena, the maiden sacrificed on the tomb of Achilles to appease his angry ghost. She is the slave who took revenge on Polymestor, the king of Thrace who murdered her youngest son Polydorus for his gold, by luring the king into her tent and having her women blind him and kill his children. And she is the woman whom legend transformed into a dog, howling on the Thracian shore before she leaped into the sea, the final indignity of a life that began in a palace and ended in a curse.

Helen of Troy is the woman whose face launched a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of Ilium, the most beautiful mortal ever born and the spark that set the Trojan War ablaze for ten years. She is the daughter of Zeus, king of the gods, who took the form of a swan to father her upon the mortal queen Leda of Sparta. She is the prize stolen by the Trojan prince Paris, a choice that doomed two civilizations and cost countless lives. She is the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta, whose humiliation drove the greatest army ever assembled across the wine-dark sea to lay siege to Troy. She is the phantom who may never have gone to Troy at all, for some say the gods sent a mere image in her place while the real Helen waited in Egypt, blameless and alone. And she is the eternal symbol of beauty so terrible it can destroy kingdoms, a name still whispered whenever someone asks what price the world pays for desire.

The Heliades are the daughters of Helios, god of the sun, whose mourning for their brother Phaethon became the mythic origin of amber. They are the radiant sisters born to Helios and Clymene, the Oceanid nymph, and joined in their grief by Phaethon's other mourning companions. They are the women who searched the River Eridanus for Phaethon's smouldering body after Zeus struck him from the solar chariot. They are the mourners who wept without ceasing until their feet rooted in the earth and their arms stretched into branches. They are the poplar trees whose bark imprisoned their living flesh while their tears flowed as golden drops. They are the daughters whose names changed from poet to poet: Aegle, Lampetia and Phaethousa in tragedy, or the longer Hesiodic company of Merope, Helie, Phoebe, Aetherie and Dioxippe. And they are the eternal keepers of a catastrophe that burned the earth, for their amber tears still carry the memory of Phaethon's fall to every shore where they are gathered.

Helios is the Titan god of the sun who drives his blazing chariot across the sky each day from the eastern land of the Ethiopians to the western garden of the Hesperides, the nymphs of the evening who tend the golden tree at the edge of the world. He is the son of Hyperion, the Titan god of light, and Theia, the Titan goddess of sight, and the brother of Selene, the goddess of the moon who drives her silver chariot through the night, and Eos, the goddess of the dawn whose rosy fingers open the gates of heaven each morning. He is the father of Aeëtes, the king of Colchis who guarded the Golden Fleece; of Circe, the witch of Aeaea who turned Odysseus's men into swine; and of Pasiphaë, the queen of Crete whose cursed passion for a white bull produced the Minotaur. He is the all-seeing witness whom the gods and mortals alike invoke when they swear the most terrible oaths, for nothing on earth or in heaven escapes the gaze of the sun. He is the grieving father whose son Phaethon begged to drive the chariot for a single day and lost control, burning the earth and freezing the sky until Zeus, the king of the gods, struck the boy down with a thunderbolt to save the world from destruction. And he is the patron god of Rhodes, whose Colossus, a gigantic bronze statue that stood at the harbour mouth, was counted among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Helle is the daughter of Athamas and the cloud goddess Nephele whose fall from the Golden Ram gave the Hellespont its ancient name. She is the twin sister of Phrixus, the two children marked for sacrifice by a famine that their jealous stepmother Ino had created and blamed upon them. She is the girl who mounted a flying, golden-fleeced ram at the last possible moment and escaped the altar beside her brother. She is the traveller who lost her hold between Sigeum and the Chersonese and vanished into the strait below, leaving her name upon the sea. She is the beloved in one late tradition, when Poseidon received rather than drowned her and carried her into his watery kingdom. She is the ghost whose death begins the whole story of the Golden Fleece, because the ram that lost Helle carried Phrixus on to Colchis, where its golden skin became the treasure of Jason and the Argonauts. And she is the lasting name of a narrow passage of water between Europe and Asia, mourned by her mother in the clouds and feared by every swimmer who came after her.

The Helm of Hades is the cap of invisibility forged by the one-eyed Cyclopes in the fires of Tartarus, the gift that made its wearer unseen by gods and mortals alike and gave Hades his dominion over the hidden world of the dead. It is the weapon Perseus borrowed to slay the Gorgon Medusa, the monster whose face turned all who looked upon it to stone, allowing him to approach unseen where no mortal could have survived. It is the helm the goddess Athena donned in the Trojan War, the cap that let her walk unseen among the Greek ranks to spur the hero Diomedes to wound the war god Ares himself. It is the artifact that Hermes, the messenger god, wore when he guided the dead or slipped past watchful eyes on Mount Olympus. And it is the ancestor of every invisibility cloak in the long history of human storytelling, from the ring of Gyges to the cap of fairy-tale dwarves, the original symbol of power that lies in not being seen.

Hephaestus is the god of fire, metalworking, and craftsmanship, the divine smith who forged the thunderbolts of Zeus and the armor of heroes. He is the only Olympian god born with a physical deformity, cast down from heaven by his own mother Hera because she could not bear the shame of his twisted foot. He is the husband of Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, a marriage arranged by Zeus that became the most notorious mismatch in all of mythology. He is the trap-maker who caught his wife in bed with Ares, the god of war, in an unbreakable golden net and dragged the lovers before the gods to humiliate them. He is the builder of automata, the creator of living statues and mechanical servants that moved and worked of their own accord. He is the patron of artisans, blacksmiths, and sculptors, and his volcanic forges still burn beneath the mountains of Sicily and the island of Lemnos. Every hammer strike in a smithy echoes his name.

Hera is the queen of the Olympian gods, the wife of Zeus who rules from the throne beside him but wages a private war against his endless infidelities. She is the goddess of marriage, childbirth, and the sacred bond between husband and wife, a protector of women in labor who could ease their pain or multiply it. She is the relentless pursuer of Zeus's illegitimate children, the illegitimate offspring of her husband's affairs with mortal women and nymphs, whom she hounded across the earth with curses and monsters. She is the mother of Ares, the god of war, and Hephaestus, the crippled smith whom she cast from heaven in shame. She is the deity who drove Heracles, the greatest Greek hero, to murder his own family in a fit of madness, and who made the Trojan War far bloodier than it needed to be. She is the peacock goddess, whose sacred bird carries the eyes of her hundred-eyed watchman Argus in its tail feathers, and whose temples at Argos and Samos were among the most magnificent in the ancient world. Every wedding vow and every jealous quarrel echoes her name.

Hercules (Heracles) is the strongest man who ever lived, the son of Zeus who strangled two serpents in his cradle before he could walk and went on to perform twelve impossible labors that no mortal before or since could have survived. He is the hero who descended into the Underworld to drag the three-headed hound Cerberus up into the light of day, and who held up the sky for the Titan Atlas while the giant fetched the golden apples of the Hesperides. He is the man driven mad by the goddess Hera, who murdered his own wife and children in a fit of divine rage and spent the rest of his life atoning for blood he never chose to spill. He is the warrior who sacked Troy before the Trojan War, who founded the Olympic Games, and whose funeral pyre burned so hot that the gods themselves took his soul to Olympus and made him immortal. And he is the namesake of the Pillars of Hercules, the rocky gates at the western edge of the Mediterranean Sea that once marked the end of the known world.

Hermes stands among the most multifaceted and widely venerated deities of the Greek pantheon. As messenger of the gods, guide of souls, patron of travellers and merchants, and divine patron of thieves, athletes, and orators, his domains span nearly every aspect of human activity. Unlike many Olympians whose spheres are narrowly defined, Hermes moves fluidly between Olympus, the mortal world, and the realm of the dead, embodying the crossing of boundaries in all their forms. From his first day of existence, when he invented the lyre and stole Apollo's cattle, Hermes demonstrated the cunning and versatility that would define his character throughout Greek mythology.

Herodotus is the Greek writer whose Histories created a new form of literature by asking how human events could be investigated, tested, preserved and explained. He is the man from Halicarnassus who introduced himself as the author of an inquiry, the first surviving long prose work to preserve the Greek word historia from which history takes its name. He is the traveller who carried his questions through Egypt, the Levant, Babylon, Thrace, Scythia and the islands of the Greek world. He is the storyteller who moved between Croesus and Cyrus, the pyramids and the Nile, Scythian horse-riders, Persian kings, Greek oracles and the women who changed the course of empires. He is the historian of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, Plataea and Mycale, where Greek cities resisted the Persian invasions of 490 and 480 BCE. He is the self-conscious investigator who announced that he would report what had been said, sometimes with belief and sometimes with doubt. And he is the writer whom Cicero called the father of history and Plutarch attacked as a malicious liar, two verdicts that still shape every reading of his work.