Greek Mythology List

Parnassus (mount) is the limestone mountain above Delphi, a real landscape layered with Greek traditions of prophecy, flood survival, Dionysiac ritual and later poetic inspiration. The Delphic sanctuary lies on its southern slopes below the Phaedriades cliffs and near the Castalian Spring. Myth makes Parnassus the mountain on which Deucalion and Pyrrha survive the flood, while Apollo's Delphic story places the god's oracle beneath its heights. The Corycian Cave was sacred especially to Pan and the Corycian nymphs, and Pausanias also describes the Thyiades performing ecstatic rites for Dionysus and Apollo on the high mountain. The Muses became strongly associated with Parnassus in later Classical, Roman and European literary tradition, although their earliest major landscape in Hesiod is Helicon rather than Parnassus.

Pasiphae is the daughter of Helios, the sun god who drove his blazing chariot across the sky each day, and the queen of Crete whose name became inseparable from the most monstrous birth in Greek legend. She is the wife of King Minos, the lawgiver whose judgements were so just that he became a judge of the dead, and the mother of Ariadne, the princess who gave Theseus the thread that led him through the Labyrinth. She is the woman cursed by Poseidon, the god of the sea and earthquakes, with an unnatural passion for a white bull, a curse that produced the Minotaur, a creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man. She is the sorceress who used magic and drugs to punish Minos for his infidelities, making him ejaculate snakes and scorpions into his lovers so they could not bear his children. And she is the sister of Circe, the enchantress who turned Odysseus's men into swine, and Aeetes, the king of Colchis who guarded the Golden Fleece, a family of power that stretched from the sun to the farthest seas.

Patroclus is the beloved companion of Achilles, the greatest warrior of the Trojan War, the man whose death turned a quarrel into a massacre and whose ashes were mingled with those of the hero he loved. He is the son of Menoetius, the king of Opus in Locris, and the boy who fled his home as a child after killing a playmate in a fit of anger and found refuge in the house of Peleus, the king of Phthia. He is the charioteer who drove Achilles into every battle, the friend who shared his tent and his meals and his silences, and the only man who could calm the hero's rage or provoke his tenderness. He is the warrior who begged Achilles to let him wear the divine armour and lead the Myrmidons into battle when the Trojans threatened to burn the Greek ships, and who died beneath the walls of Troy at the hands of Hector, the Trojan prince, and Euphorbus, the Trojan spearman. And he is the fallen companion whose body Achilles guarded for seventeen days, refusing food and sleep, until he had killed Hector and dragged his corpse around the tomb as payment for the life he could not restore.

Pausanias is the Greek periegete, or guide writer, whose Description of Greece preserves the most detailed ancient account of the monuments, sanctuaries, statues, rituals, legends and historical memories of mainland Greece in the Roman period. He is the unknown traveller probably born in Magnesia ad Sipylum in Lydia, whose life can be reconstructed only from scattered remarks in his own work. He is the writer who toured the Roman Empire, visited Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Italy and the Aegean, and chose for his surviving book not the whole known world but the heartland of old Greece. He is the author of ten books that move from the Piraeus and Athens through Corinth, Argos, Sparta, Messenia, Olympia, Achaea, Arcadia, Boeotia, Delphi and Ozolian Locris. He is the eyewitness who describes the Parthenon and Erechtheum, the sanctuary of Hera at Argos, the throne of Apollo at Amyclae, the Altis at Olympia, the Arcadian mountains, the tombs of Plataea and the monuments of Delphi. He is the collector of local traditions who records what Greeks say about their gods, heroes, springs, trees, stones, oracles and ancient battles, sometimes declaring that he reports without believing. He is the literary witness whose work was little read in antiquity, nearly vanished in the Middle Ages and was revived by Renaissance travellers and 19th-century archaeologists. And he is the author whose one securely surviving work, the Periegesis Hellados, became the indispensable guide to Greek religion, art, myth and cultural memory.

Pegasus is the winged horse born from the blood of the severed Gorgon Medusa, a creature so terrible that one look at her face turned living things to stone, the most magnificent steed in all of Greek mythology and the only beast whose flight carried a mortal man to the realm of the gods. He is the offspring of Poseidon, the god of the sea who ruled the oceans from his underwater palace of coral and pearl, and the cursed Medusa, one of three Gorgon sisters who had once been beautiful maidens before Athena, the goddess of wisdom born fully armed from the head of her father Zeus, the king of the gods and wielder of the thunderbolt, transformed her into a monster as punishment for a desecration in her temple. He is the mount of Bellerophon, the Corinthian hero who tamed him with a golden bridle given by Athena and who rode him to slay the Chimera, a fire-breathing monster with the body of a lion, the tail of a serpent, and the head of a goat that terrorized the kingdom of Lycia. He is the steed who struck the rock of Mount Helicon with his hoof and brought forth the Hippocrene, the sacred spring of the Muses, the nine daughters of Zeus and Memory who inspired poets and musicians, whose waters granted poetic inspiration to all who drank them. He is the horse who carried Bellerophon too close to Olympus, the sacred mountain where the twelve great Olympian gods made their eternal home, and was stung by a gadfly sent by Zeus to throw his rider, for no mortal was permitted to enter the realm of the gods alive. And he is the constellation that still gallops across the northern sky, his wings spread forever among the stars, a reminder that the Greeks believed wonder could be born from horror and that even monsters could father beauty.

Peiras is one of the most obscure named figures in Greek myth. He survives because Pausanias, quoting a genealogy attributed to Epimenides of Crete, says that Styx was a daughter of Oceanus and bore Echidna to Peiras. Pausanias immediately adds 'whoever Peiras may be', making the ancient writer's own uncertainty part of the evidence. No secure parents, homeland, deeds, cult or death are attached to this Peiras in the surviving notice. His importance is therefore entirely genealogical: one alternative tradition places him and Styx at the beginning of Echidna's monstrous family, while other sources give Echidna completely different parents.

Peleus is the king of Phthia who won the sea-goddess Thetis by holding her through every shape she could take, the mortal whose grip was stronger than fire, water, lion, serpent, and tree, and who became the father of the greatest warrior Greece ever produced. He is the son of Aeacus, the king of Aegina, and the grandson of Zeus, the king of the gods, a prince whose divine blood was diluted by mortality but never extinguished. He is the Argonaut who sailed with Jason in search of the Golden Fleece, the hunter who stood beside Meleager against the Calydonian Boar, and the exile who killed his half-brother Phocus and fled to Thessaly to build a new kingdom. He is the husband of Thetis, the Nereid whose beauty attracted both Zeus and Poseidon until a prophecy warned that her son would be greater than his father, and who was given to Peleus because no god dared to risk the fate that had befallen Uranus and Cronus. And he is the old king who outlived his only son, who sent Achilles to Troy knowing he would never return, and who died alone in Phthia while his grandson Neoptolemus avenged the father he had lost.

Pelias is the usurper king of Iolcus who sent his nephew Jason on the quest for the Golden Fleece, the gleaming hide of the winged ram Chrysomallos that hung in a grove sacred to the war god Ares in distant Colchis, a mission he believed would be the death of the young man who threatened his throne. He is the twin born of the sea god Poseidon's union with Tyro, the daughter of King Salmoneus of Elis, a child exposed on a mountainside and raised by horse herders who returned to claim a kingdom that was not his. He is the king who seized the throne of Iolcus from his half-brother Aeson, the rightful heir, and who lived in fear of an oracle that warned him to beware a man wearing one sandal. He is the tyrant who was murdered by his own daughters, tricked by the sorceress Medea into cutting their father into pieces and boiling him in a cauldron, believing they could restore his youth. And he is the catalyst of the greatest voyage in Greek myth, the man whose fear of a prophecy set the Argo sailing and brought heroes from every corner of Greece to the shores of the Black Sea.

Pelops is the dark-shouldered king whose name gave the Peloponnese to the Greeks, the son of Tantalus who survived his father's cannibal feast and won a kingdom by treachery in a chariot race that killed a god's son. He is the Phrygian prince who came to Greece as an exile, bringing with him the wealth of Asia and the curse of a family that had already offended the gods beyond forgiveness. He is the suitor who defeated Oenomaus, the king of Pisa who murdered eighteen young men rather than give his daughter away, by bribing the king's charioteer to sabotage the divine car with wax linchpins. He is the husband of Hippodamia, the princess whose hand he won with blood, and the father of Atreus and Thyestes, the brothers whose feud of adultery, cannibalism, and revenge would curse the next three generations of his house. And he is the founder of the Olympic Games, the victor who established the greatest athletic festival in the ancient world upon the grave of the man he had murdered by proxy, a monument to his own triumph that concealed the treachery beneath it.

Penelope is the queen of Ithaca who waited twenty years for her husband Odysseus to return from the Trojan War, the most famous faithful wife in all of literature and the only woman in Greek myth whose cunning matched her husband's own. She is the weaver who held off a hundred and eight suitors for three years by promising to choose a new husband only when she had finished weaving a shroud for her father-in-law Laertes, then unravelling by torchlight each night what she had woven by day. She is the mother who raised Telemachus, her only son, from a babe in arms to a young man brave enough to sail across the wine-dark sea to search for news of his father, guided by Athena, the goddess of wisdom and warfare. She is the woman who recognised her husband in the beggar's rags he wore to test her, not by his face or his voice but by the secret of their marriage bed, an olive tree trunk around which their chamber had been built, a bed that could never be moved because it was rooted in the living earth. And she is the queen who, when the suitors lay dead in her hall, stood beside her husband in the blood and smoke and proved that loyalty, patience, and intelligence are weapons as sharp as any sword.

Peneus is the river god of Thessaly, the Titan whose waters carved the Vale of Tempe through the mountains of northern Greece and whose voice answered the prayer that turned his daughter Daphne into a laurel tree. He is the son of Oceanus and Tethys, the primordial deities of the sea, and one of the three thousand river gods who flow through the earth. He is the father who heard his daughter beg for destruction rather than surrender, and who granted her the only escape that a god could give: bark instead of skin, branches instead of arms, roots instead of feet. He is the river that still runs through Thessaly today, the Pinios of modern Greece, its waters fed by the snows of Mount Olympus and the rains of the northern plains. He is the god whose nymphs, the Peneiades, haunted his banks and sang to the reeds, and whose waters were said to hold the power of prophecy. And he is the river that Apollo, the Olympian god of music and prophecy, made sacred by association, for the laurel that grew from Daphne's body was planted along his shores and carried to the temples of Delphi.

Pentheus is the king of Thebes who denied the divinity of Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy, and paid for his disbelief with his life, torn limb from limb on Mount Cithaeron by the very women of his own city whom the god had driven into divine madness. He is the grandson of Cadmus, the Phoenician prince who founded Thebes by sowing the teeth of a dragon into the earth and raising the armed men who sprang from the soil, and the son of Agave, the daughter of Cadmus, who in her frenzy did not recognise her own child and led the Maenads in his destruction. He is the ruler who imprisoned the god's followers and threatened the god himself, only to be dressed in women's robes and led to the mountainside as a spy, perched in a pine tree to watch the secret rites he had forbidden. He is the man whose severed head was carried back to Thebes by his own mother on the point of a thyrsus, a trophy she believed to be a mountain lion's until the madness lifted and she saw what she had done. And he is the eternal warning that the gods are not to be mocked, that ecstasy denied becomes vengeance, and that the king who thinks himself above the divine will find himself below the earth.