Greek Mythology List

The Indica is the lost Greek work on India written by Megasthenes, a Seleucid envoy who visited the court of Chandragupta Maurya. Later authors preserve extensive fragments on geography, Pataliputra, royal administration, elephants, social groups, philosophers and the natural world. The work is commonly reconstructed as a multi-book account, often described as four books, but its original organisation and the numbering of surviving fragments depend on later testimony and modern editions. Megasthenes' observations mix first-hand material, Greek categories and stories of marvels, making the Indica both indispensable and uneven as evidence for Mauryan India. It should also be distinguished from other ancient works called Indica, especially those of Ctesias and Arrian.

Ino is a daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia whose name joins several different Greek mythic traditions. In the Golden Fleece cycle she can appear as the hostile stepmother who plots against Phrixus and Helle. In Dionysiac tradition she is the courageous aunt who helps nurse the infant Dionysus and suffers Hera's vengeance. After madness destroys the household of Ino and Athamas, Ino and her son Melicertes enter the sea and are transformed into the marine divinities Leucothea and Palaemon. As Leucothea she appears in the Odyssey to save the shipwrecked Odysseus with her veil. These strands should be preserved as variant cycles attached to the same figure rather than treated as a psychologically continuous biography with one fixed moral character.

Io is the Argive princess whose name means "moon" in the dialect of her city, the priestess of Hera who was transformed into a white heifer with horns like crescents of the moon. She is the mortal lover of Zeus, the king of the gods who ruled from Mount Olympus, whose affair with her drove the queen of the gods to a jealousy so terrible that it reshaped the geography of the world. She is the cow who was guarded by Argus Panoptes, the hundred-eyed giant whose gaze never slept, and who was freed by Hermes, the messenger god who moved between heaven and earth with winged sandals, when he lulled the giant to sleep with music and stories. She is the wanderer who crossed the strait that still bears her name, the Bosporus, the ox-passage, and who climbed the mountains of Caucasus to meet Prometheus, the Titan who had stolen fire for mankind and was chained to a rock where an eagle ate his liver each day. She is the mother of Epaphus, the boy born from Zeus's touch in Egypt, whose descendants would include Danaus, the king who returned to Argos with his fifty daughters, and Cadmus, the Phoenician prince who founded the city of Thebes. And she is the woman whose descendants include Perseus, the slayer of the Gorgon Medusa, and Heracles, the hero who completed twelve impossible labours, a lineage that made her the ancestress of almost every great hero in Greece.

Iobates is the king of Lycia who received a sealed letter ordering him to murder the man who carried it, and who found himself unable to kill the greatest hero of his age. He is the father of Philonoe, the princess he gave in marriage to the very man he had been commanded to destroy. He is the lord who sent Bellerophon, the rider of the winged horse Pegasus, against the Chimera, the fire-breathing monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent, and who watched in astonishment as the hero returned alive. He is the king who then sent Bellerophon against the Solymi, the warlike tribe of Lycia, and against the Amazons, the warrior women who lived beyond the Black Sea, and who set an ambush of his best soldiers, only to see them all defeated. He is the ruler who finally understood that Bellerophon was favoured by the gods and gave him half his kingdom and his daughter's hand rather than continue a war he could not win. And he is the ancestor of Glaucus, the Lycian hero who fought beside the Trojan prince Hector in the Trojan War, a legacy that stretched from the age of monsters to the age of cities.

Iolaus is the nephew and charioteer of Heracles, the hero forced to complete twelve impossible labours, and the only mortal who stood beside the greatest Greek hero from his first labour to his last. He is the youth who saved Heracles' life during the battle with the Lernaean Hydra, the serpent with nine heads that grew two more whenever one was cut off, by seizing a burning brand and cauterising each neck as Heracles struck it off, preventing the monster from regenerating. He is the co-founder of the Olympic Games, the sacred athletic festival held at Olympia in the Peloponnese, where he and Heracles established the tradition of athletic competition in honour of Zeus. He is the old man who led the children of Heracles into battle against Eurystheus, the king of Tiryns who had persecuted the hero all his life, avenging his uncle even after Heracles had ascended to Olympus. And he is the hero whose tomb at Thebes was shown to travellers for centuries, a shrine where the Thebans made offerings to the man who had been more than a nephew to Heracles, he had been his right hand, his charioteer, and his friend.

Iolcus is the Thessalian city associated with Pelias, Jason and the departure of the Argonautic expedition. Homer calls it well-built and spacious within Thessalian geography, while later myth makes Pelias the usurping ruler who sends Jason after the Golden Fleece. The heroes assemble in the Iolcus-Pagasae region, and Apollonius places the Argo's departure at Pagasae on the Pagasitic Gulf. Mycenaean centres around modern Volos, including Kastro/Palaia, Dimini and Pefkakia, provide the Late Bronze Age landscape often discussed in attempts to locate historical Iolcus. Scholars and excavators have proposed different identifications, so no single excavated complex should be presented as the proven palace of Jason's legendary city.

Iphicles is the mortal twin of Heracles, the son of Amphitryon who shared a cradle with a demigod and spent his whole life in the shadow of the greatest hero Greece ever knew. He is the son of Alcmene, the most beautiful woman in Thebes, and Amphitryon, the exiled prince who returned to avenge his brothers' deaths, born on the same night as Heracles but fathered by a mortal man rather than by Zeus, the king of the gods. He is the father of Iolaus, the young charioteer who drove Heracles to every labour and who loved his uncle more than his own father. He is the warrior who fought beside Heracles in the first sack of Troy, who stood shoulder to shoulder with the demigod against the Amazons, and who died not in glory but in the ordinary way of mortal men, leaving no legends except the one that he was there. And he is the proof that Greek mythology did not forget the ordinary, the man who was born beside a god and lived a human life, whose only immortality was the son he raised and the brother he loved.

Iphigenia is the daughter of Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae and commander of the Greek fleet bound for Troy, whose sacrifice at Aulis became the most terrible price ever demanded for fair winds. She is the maiden who was led to the altar believing she was to marry Achilles, the greatest warrior of the Greeks, only to find her father's hand raised with the sacrificial blade and the priest Calchas chanting prayers to Artemis, the virgin goddess of the hunt. She is the girl who was saved at the last moment by Artemis herself, spirited away to the barbarian land of Tauris on the Black Sea, where she served as a priestess forced to perform human sacrifices upon every Greek sailor who washed ashore. She is the sister who recognised her brother Orestes, the matricide haunted by the Furies, when he came to steal the sacred statue of Artemis from her temple, and who helped him escape with the image that had demanded so many deaths. And she is the woman who finally returned to Greece and established the cult of Artemis at Brauron, the sanctuary in Attica where young Athenian girls dedicated their childhood toys before marriage, a priestess who had seen the worst of both gods and men and lived to tell the story.

Iris is the rainbow made divine, the golden-winged messenger who runs the shining bridge between heaven and earth faster than thought. She is the daughter of Thaumas, Wonder, and Electra, the amber-bright Oceanid, born of the sea and the sky as a rainbow must be. She is the herald of Olympus in the Iliad, the voice that carries the commands of Zeus down to the battlefields of Troy, to Helen in her tower, to Priam in his grief, and to proud Poseidon, whom she must order off the field of war. She is the handmaid of Hera, who sleeps at the foot of her mistress's throne like a faithful hound, girded and sandalled and ready to run at the slightest word. She is the cup-bearer of the oath of the gods, who fetches the freezing water of the river Styx in a golden pitcher, the water by which the immortals swear and which punishes any god who lies. And she is the bridge that never breaks: between gods and mortals, sea and sky, storm and sunlight, and between the waking world and the cave of Sleep.

Ischys is the Arcadian lover whose affair with Coronis provoked Apollo's jealousy and led to the death of Coronis and the miraculous rescue of Asclepius. He is the son of Elatus, son of Arcas, an Arcadian prince whose name means Strength. He is the mortal rival of Apollo who lay with Coronis while she carried the god's unborn child. He is the man whom Pindar names without explanation, as if every Greek audience already understood the folly of taking a divine lover's woman. He is the husband or secret lover of Coronis in later accounts, a man who accepted a woman already possessed by the god. He is the victim whose fate changes with the teller: Apollo shoots him with arrows, Zeus strikes him with a thunderbolt or Ovid leaves his death subordinate to Apollo's rage at Coronis. He is the lover who never speaks and never receives a motive, biography, family or cult of his own. He is the shadow through which Apollo's omniscience, jealousy and remorse are revealed. He is the father of none of the surviving traditions, because the child in Coronis' womb is Apollo's son, Asclepius, who will become the greatest healer of Greece. He is the small mortal figure at the centre of one of Apollo's greatest myths: a man whose love affair costs a woman's life, destroys his own and helps produce the god of medicine from the ashes of his rival's rage. And he is the Ischys who appears only in fragments and late retellings, his memory preserved entirely through the story of Coronis and her divine lover.

Ithaca is the rugged Ionian island that rules the imagination of Greek mythology as the home to which Odysseus struggles to return after ten years of war and ten years of wandering. It is the island of King Laertes, Queen Anticleia, Penelope and the young Telemachus, the household left unguarded when Odysseus sails to Troy. It is a small, rough land with no wide horse pastures, yet a good nurse of men, a place whose cliffs, harbours, caves and olive trees preserve the hero's memory. It is the site of Phorcys Bay, Raven's Rock, the Spring of Arethusa, the cave of the Naiads, Eumaeus's swineherd hut and the palace where Penelope's suitors have consumed Odysseus's household for three years. It is the kingdom where the returning hero comes disguised as a beggar, recognises his aged dog Argos, receives a bath from Eurycleia, proves himself to Penelope through the secret of their immovable bed and wins back his throne with the bow contest. And it is the island whose geography Homer made so familiar that readers have spent more than two thousand years trying to place its bays, peaks and neighbours on the modern map, with the island of Ithaki, the peninsula of Paliki and the island of Lefkada all claiming the name.

Ixion is the king of the Lapiths in Thessaly who became the first mortal ever to shed the blood of kin and be welcomed to Olympus by Zeus, the king of the gods, only to betray that mercy with a lust so monstrous that it invented a new species of monster. He is the murderer who pushed his father-in-law Deioneus into a pit of burning coals rather than pay the bride-price he had promised, and who was then purified by Zeus in a gesture of divine clemency that no mortal had ever received. He is the guest who, seated at the table of the gods on Olympus, looked across the golden cups and desired Hera, the queen of the gods and Zeus's own wife, a crime against hospitality so profound that it broke the oldest law in the Greek world. He is the fool who coupled with a cloud shaped like Hera by Zeus's own hand, fathering the race of Centaurs, the half-man half-horse creatures who would terrorise the mountains of Thessaly for generations. And he is the eternal prisoner bound to a burning wheel that spins forever in the dark pit of Tartarus, the first human being to be punished in the deepest abyss of the underworld, a warning to every king who thinks that divine forgiveness means divine permission.