Greek Mythology List

Poseidon's Trident is the three-pronged spear forged by the Cyclopes in the fires beneath the earth, the weapon that shook mountains and summoned tidal waves with a single strike. It is the gift that won a war, given to Poseidon by Brontes, Steropes, and Arges, the one-eyed giants who also forged Zeus's thunderbolts and Hades's helmet of darkness. It is the spear that could split rock to create springs, turn fertile valleys into salt marshes, and call forth earthquakes that toppled cities. It is the weapon Poseidon used to contest the patronage of Athens against Athena, striking the Acropolis to produce a salt spring while Athena offered the olive tree. And it is the sceptre that made Poseidon lord of the sea, the earth-shaker, and the god whom sailors prayed to with trembling hands before every voyage across the wine-dark Aegean.

Priam is the last king of Troy, the aged monarch who watched his city burn after ten years of war, the father of the greatest Trojan hero and the man whose grief moved even his enemies to pity. He is the king of the wealthy and powerful city of Troy, which stood on the northwestern coast of modern Turkey and controlled the trade routes between Europe and Asia, a kingdom of golden walls and broad streets that the gods themselves had helped to build. He is the father of Hector, the greatest Trojan warrior, a man of such nobility that even the Greeks honored him, and of Paris, the prince whose abduction of Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, launched the thousand ships that brought destruction to Troy's gates. He is the husband of Hecuba, the queen who dreamed of burning torches before Paris's birth, and the father of fifty sons and many daughters, a patriarch whose family was both the glory and the doom of his kingdom. He is the old man who crossed the battlefield alone at night, guided by Hermes, the messenger god whose swift feet carried him between Olympus and the earth below, to kneel before Achilles, the greatest Greek warrior, and beg for the body of his dead son Hector. And he is the king who died at the altar of Zeus, the king of the gods and wielder of the thunderbolt, butchered by Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, as the Greeks sacked his city and put his grandchildren to the sword.

Proetus is the king of Tiryns who shared his mother's womb with his mortal enemy and spent his life fighting the brother he could never escape. He is the son of Abas, the king of Argos, and the twin of Acrisius, the grandfather of Perseus, the hero who would one day slay the Gorgon Medusa and rescue the princess Andromeda from a sea monster. He is the husband of Anteia, or Stheneboea in some tellings, the queen who desired Bellerophon and then accused him of assault when he refused her. He is the king who sent Bellerophon to his father-in-law Iobates, the king of Lycia, with a sealed letter that commanded the recipient to murder the bearer. He is the father of the Proetides, the daughters who were driven mad by the goddess Hera and wandered the hills of Argolis believing themselves to be cattle, until the seer Melampus cured them at the price of a third of the kingdom. He is the lord who ruled from Tiryns, the city whose massive walls were built by the Cyclopes, the one-eyed giants who served the gods. 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 quarrels of twins to the walls of Troy.

Prometheus is the Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity, the act that transformed naked, shivering mortals into builders, smiths, and thinkers. He is the forethinker who tricked Zeus at the feast of Mecone, hiding the best meat inside an ox's stomach while wrapping the bones in glistening fat, a deception that established the rules of sacrifice for all time. He is the creator who shaped the first humans from clay and water, breathing life into them with the help of the goddess Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war who sprang fully grown from the head of Zeus. He is the prisoner chained to a rock in the Caucasus Mountains, where an eagle sent by Zeus devoured his immortal liver every day, the organ growing back each night only to be torn out again. And he is the eternal symbol of rebellion against tyranny, the figure who chose the suffering of mortals over the comfort of Olympus and paid for that choice with endless torment.

Proteus is the Old Man of the Sea, the shape-shifting prophet who serves Poseidon and tends the seals of the ocean, a god who knows all things past, present, and future but will only speak truth to the man who can hold him fast. He is the son of Oceanus, the Titan whose river encircles the entire world, and Tethys, his sister and wife, the goddess of the fertile waters, one of the primordial sea-deities who ruled before the Olympians. He is the oracle who told Menelaus, the king of Sparta whose wife Helen had been taken to Troy, how to escape the becalmed Egyptian shore, and who revealed to Aristaeus, the shepherd-god, the sacrifice that would save his bees from extinction. He is the master of metamorphosis who shifts from lion to serpent to fire to water when seized, testing the determination of any mortal who dares demand his counsel. And he is the sea-god whose island of Pharos, off the coast of Egypt, became the site of the greatest lighthouse ever built, a beacon whose name still means a guiding light in every language under the sun.

Psyche is the mortal princess whose beauty was so extraordinary that the people of her kingdom abandoned the temples of Aphrodite and worshipped her instead. She is the bride of Eros, the winged god of love and desire, who visited her in a palace of gold and marble but forbade her to see his face. She is the woman who broke that trust, holding a lamp over her sleeping husband and spilling a drop of hot oil upon his shoulder, causing him to flee. She is the wanderer who completed four impossible tasks for the jealous goddess Aphrodite: sorting a mountain of mixed grains in a single night, fetching golden wool from man-eating sheep, drawing water from the river Styx that flowed through the Underworld, and fetching a box of beauty from Persephone, the queen of the dead. She is the mortal who became a goddess, granted immortality by Zeus, the king of the gods, and given a place on Mount Olympus. And she is the namesake of the human soul, the word from which psychology, psychiatry, and every study of the mind takes its name, a legacy that has outlasted empires.

Psyche's Sisters are the two elder sisters whose jealousy drove Psyche to betray her husband and whose greed led them to their deaths on a rocky mountain. They are the daughters of a Greek king whose youngest child, Psyche, was so beautiful that the people of the kingdom abandoned the worship of Venus, the goddess of love and beauty, to adore her instead. They are the women who visited Psyche in her invisible husband's palace and were consumed by envy at the luxury and splendour that surrounded her. They are the voices of doubt who convinced Psyche that her husband was a monstrous serpent, urging her to take a lamp and a knife to his bed and discover his true form. They are the agents of Venus, the goddess of love, who called them to her mountain and promised them the place of Psyche as the bride of Eros, the god of love and son of Venus, if they would torment their sister with false hope. They are the women who leapt from a high rock expecting Zephyrus, the gentle west wind, to carry them to the palace of love, and who fell instead to their deaths on the stones below. And they are the eternal warning that envy destroys the envious as surely as it wounds the envied, that the sisters who plot against fortune are the first to be crushed by it. Every whisper of doubt in a happy marriage, every sister who covets what another has, and every leap of greed that ends in ruin carries their shadow.

Python is the earth-born serpent who coiled around the omphalos stone at Delphi, the navel of the world, and spoke oracles before any Olympian god set foot on Mount Parnassus. She is the daughter of Gaia, the primordial Earth herself, born from the rotting slime left behind when Zeus sent the great flood to destroy the race of men. She is the guardian whose single body sprawled across so many acres that her scales ground ancient oaks to powder, and whose poisoned breath made the Castalian Spring run black. She is the monster who pursued Leto, the daughter of the Titan Coeus, across the lands while the goddess was heavy with the twins Apollo and Artemis, forcing the wind to carry her to the floating island of Delos. She is the serpent slain by Apollo when he was only four days old, a hundred arrows emptying his quiver into her bloated coils until she rotted where she fell, giving the sacred place its name of Pytho. And she is the namesake of the Pythian Games, the Pythia who sat upon the tripod, and the very word python that still coils through our language as the name of a constricting snake.

Rhea is the Titaness who saved the king of the gods from being swallowed by his own father, the mother whose cunning preserved the child who would overthrow the old order and establish the reign of Olympus, the sacred mountain where the twelve great Olympian gods made their eternal home. She is the daughter of Gaia, the earth goddess, and Uranus, the sky god who was castrated by his son Cronus, and she is the sister and wife of Cronus, the Titan who ruled the cosmos before the Olympians and who devoured his own children to prevent a prophecy of his downfall. She is the mother of six gods who would reshape the world, Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus, the last-born and the one she saved by trickery and sacrifice. She is the goddess who gave Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes to swallow instead of the infant Zeus, and who hid her son in a cave on Crete, the large island south of the Greek mainland, where the nymphs of Mount Ida nursed him on the milk of the goat Amalthea and the Kouretes, the armed young men, clashed their spears on their shields to drown out the baby's cries so that Cronus would not hear him. She is the deity whose worship spread across the ancient world, from the mountains of Crete to the plains of Phrygia, where she was honored as the Great Mother, a goddess of fertility and wild nature whose rites were celebrated with drums and ecstatic dancing. And she is the Titaness who, after the war between the old gods and the new, stepped aside and let her children rule, a rare figure in mythology who surrendered power without being destroyed, and who was remembered not as a warrior or a ruler but as the mother whose love was stronger than a king's tyranny.

The Styx is the black river of the underworld whose cold water is the most sacred substance in the cosmos, the stream by which the gods themselves swear their most terrible and unbreakable oaths. She is the Titaness daughter of Oceanus, the world-encircling river, and Tethys, the queen of the waters, and the mother of four children who stand forever beside Zeus: Nike, Victory, Kratos, Strength, Bia, Force, and Zelus, Rivalry. She is the first immortal to aid Zeus in the Titanomachy, the ten-year war between the old Titans and the young Olympians, and her reward was to become the Great Oath of heaven, the test no god may fail. She is the doom of perjured immortals, who lie voiceless for a year and are exiled from Olympus for nine more if they swear falsely. She is the river into which the goddess Thetis dipped the infant Achilles to make him invulnerable, leaving only the heel by which she held him. And she is a real waterfall in the Arcadian mountains of Greece, whose black water was said to shatter every vessel except a horse's hoof, and which rumour blamed for the death of Alexander the Great.

Satyr is the wild spirit of the forest who dances through the night with wine in one hand and a flute in the other, half-man and half-beast, driven by appetites that civilization cannot tame. He is the creature who chases nymphs through the moonlit groves, his laughter echoing between the trees, never quite catching what he desires. He is the chorus of the satyr play, the bawdy comedy that followed the tragedies at Athens, where men dressed in horse-tails and padded phalluses mocked the very gods they had just worshipped. He is the companion of Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstatic madness, riding in the wine god's wild procession through the mountains of Thrace and the vineyards of Nysa. And he is the living reminder that beneath every ordered society lies the wilderness, the drunkenness, and the music that refuses to be civilised.

Scheria is the mythological island kingdom of the Phaeacians, the remote and wealthy people who gave Odysseus his final passage home after ten years of wandering. It is the land the Phaeacians chose after fleeing the brutality of the Cyclopes, founded by Nausithous, son of Poseidon, and made famous by the palace of King Alcinous and Queen Arete. It is the setting for the meeting between the naked, salt-crusted Odysseus and the young Princess Nausicaa at the river where she washes her wedding clothes. It is the place where the hero enters a palace whose bronze walls shine like sun or moon, whose doors are flanked by golden and silver dogs made by Hephaestus and whose gardens produce fruit in every season. It is the court where Odysseus reveals his name and tells the four-book story of the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, the Underworld and Calypso. It is the homeland of magical ships that know the thoughts of their passengers, sail without rudders and cross the sea with the speed of a falcon. And it is the island punished by Poseidon for carrying the sea god's enemy, when the returning Phaeacian ship is turned to stone at the harbour mouth and its people lose their ancient privilege of conveying wanderers.