Greek Mythology List

Scylla is the six-headed sea monster who lurks in a cave on the Italian side of the Strait of Messina, snatching sailors from passing ships with jaws that close like traps. She is the creature with twelve dangling feet and six long necks, each topped with a ravenous head lined with three rows of sharp teeth, whose voice sounds like the yelping of hounds. She is the beautiful nymph who was transformed into a monster by the jealous sorceress Circe, the goddess of magic and transformation who turned men into beasts, because the sea god Glaucus loved her instead of Circe. She is the nightmare that forces every captain to choose between her rocks and the whirlpool Charybdis, the monster who swallows water three times a day and spits it out again in a deadly vortex. And she is the origin of the phrase between Scylla and Charybdis, the impossible choice between two evils that has haunted decision-makers for three thousand years.

Selene is the goddess of the moon, the Titaness who drives her silver chariot across the night sky and bathes the sleeping world in pale light, the most beautiful of the night deities and the only goddess whose love for a mortal man was so great that she asked Zeus, the king of the gods and wielder of the thunderbolt, to grant him eternal youth in endless sleep. She is the daughter of the Titans Hyperion and Theia, the sister of Helios, the sun god who drives his blazing chariot across the sky by day, and Eos, the dawn goddess who paints the eastern horizon rose and gold each morning. She is the charioteer who rises from the Ocean, the river that encircles the world, and climbs the dome of heaven, her two white horses drawing the crescent moon behind her, their hooves treading the paths of the stars. She is the lover of Endymion, the shepherd prince of Mount Latmus in Caria, a youth of such extraordinary beauty that Selene looked down from the sky, saw him sleeping in a cave, and descended to kiss him, returning night after night to watch over him while the world below lay in darkness. She is the mother of fifty daughters, the Menae, the months of the lunar calendar, born of her union with Endymion in his eternal slumber. And she is the goddess whose face is the moon itself, whose waxing and waning mark the passage of time, and whose silver light has guided travellers, lovers, and poets since the earliest ages of Greece.

Semele is the Theban princess who loved Zeus, the king of the gods, and was consumed by his thunderbolt when she demanded to see him in his true divine form, the mortal woman whose death gave birth to a god. She is the daughter of Cadmus, the Phoenician prince who founded Thebes by sowing the teeth of a dragon into the earth, and Harmonia, the daughter of Ares, the war god, and Aphrodite, the goddess of love, a royal lineage that made her worthy of a god's attention but could not protect her from a goddess's jealousy. She is the mother of Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy, whom Zeus rescued from her burning womb and carried to term in his own thigh, the only Olympian god born from a father rather than a mother. She is the woman whom Hera, the queen of the gods, destroyed by disguising herself as an old nurse and planting a seed of doubt that grew into a fatal demand. And she is the heroine who rose from the dead, retrieved from the Underworld by her son Dionysus and granted a place among the immortals as Thyone, the goddess who shares her son's triumph and his worship.

The Shield of Achilles is the most famous piece of armour ever described in poetry, the divine shield forged by Hephaestus, the lame god of the forge, at the desperate plea of the sea nymph Thetis, the mother of the greatest Greek warrior at Troy. It is the shield that replaced the one Achilles lost when his closest companion Patroclus borrowed his armour and was killed by the Trojan prince Hector, the greatest warrior the Trojans had. It is the masterpiece on which the smith-god hammered the whole world in miniature, two cities, one at peace and one at war, fields being ploughed and harvested, vineyards being trodden, cattle being raided, and youths and maidens dancing in a ring, all surrounded by the River Oceanus that rings the earth. It is the shield Achilles carried when he returned to battle to avenge Patroclus, when he faced Hector in single combat before the walls of Troy, and when he cut through the Trojan ranks like a fire through dry grass. And it is the prize that outlived him, fought over by the Greek heroes Ajax and Odysseus after his death, the shield that contained the whole of human life and yet could not save the man who bore it.

The Sickle of Cronus is the curved blade of grey adamant that ended the reign of Uranus, the sky, and began the age of the Titans, the single stroke that changed the cosmos from a prison into a battlefield. It is the weapon Gaia, the earth herself, forged from the hardest substance in existence and placed in the hand of her youngest and boldest son, the Titan Cronus, so that he could strike down the father who had buried his children in darkness. It is the blade whose stroke produced the Furies, the Erinyes, the goddesses of vengeance who pursue oath-breakers and kin-slayers to the ends of the world, and the Giants, the monstrous beings who would one day challenge Olympus. It is the sickle from whose bloody foam rose Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, born from violence and desire in the same moment. And it is the ancestor of every patricidal weapon in myth and history, the original proof that the son who overthrows the father sets in motion a chain of vengeance that no throne can escape.

Silenus is the old satyr who rode a donkey through the revels of Dionysus, too drunk to walk and too wise to ignore when the wine finally cleared his head. He is the foster father and tutor of Dionysus, the god of wine, ecstasy, and the vine, who was raised in secret on Mount Nysa to protect him from the jealous Hera. He is the companion whose bald head, snub nose, and pot belly became the image of joyful excess in Greek art, and whose constant drunkenness masked a prophetic wisdom that kings would kill to hear. He is the prisoner of King Midas of Phrygia, who found him sleeping in a rose garden and tied him with garlands of flowers, then entertained him for ten days and nights until Dionysus came to claim him. And he is the figure who, when asked what is best for man, replied that the greatest blessing is never to have been born, and the second best is to die young -- a philosophy that has haunted philosophers ever since.

Simoeis is the river-god of the Troad whose waters rushed down from Mount Ida to join the Scamander on the plain of Troy, a deity so bound to the land that his daughters married into the Trojan royal house and his name became synonymous with the war itself. 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 father of Astyoche, who married Erichthonius and bore Tros, the king who gave his name to Troy, and of Hieromneme, who married Assaracus and bore Capys, the grandfather of Anchises, the father of Aeneas. He is the river whose waters sprang ambrosia for the horses of Hera and Athena when the goddesses rode to battle, and whose brother-river Scamander called upon him for aid when Achilles threatened to drown the plain in blood. And he is the stream that Virgil remembered as rolling shields and helmets of brave men down its current when Troy fell, a river that still flows today as the Dümruk Su in Turkey.

Siren is the bird-woman whose song is so beautiful that no sailor who hears it can resist steering toward her island, even knowing that the shore is lined with the rotting bones of those who came before. She is the creature with the head and breasts of a woman and the body, wings, and talons of a bird, a hybrid that the Greeks understood as a creature of hidden knowledge rather than mere seduction. She is the daughter of the river god Achelous and the Muse Terpsichore, or perhaps Melpomene, born from the music of the world itself. She is the handmaiden who failed to save Persephone, the maiden who became queen of the dead, and was transformed into a bird by Demeter, the goddess of grain, so that she could search the skies for the lost girl. And she is the origin of the word siren itself, the wailing sound that warns of danger while drawing the ear toward it, a paradox that has echoed through three thousand years of language.

Sisyphus is the king of Corinth who cheated death not once but twice, the craftiest mortal who ever lived and the only man in Greek mythology who outwitted the gods so thoroughly that they invented an eternal punishment just for him. He is the son of Aeolus, son of Hellen, and the founder of the great city of Corinth, which he built on the narrow isthmus that connects the Peloponnese to mainland Greece, a city so strategically placed that it dominated trade between the eastern and western Mediterranean. He is the trickster who bound Thanatos, the personification of death himself, in his own chains, so that for a time no mortal on earth could die and the world filled with the walking old and wounded who could not find release. He is the husband who told his wife Merope not to bury him when he died, so that when he arrived in the underworld he could complain to Persephone, the queen of the dead, that he had been left unburied and beg to be sent back to earth to punish his wife, a ruse so audacious that it actually worked. And he is the eternal prisoner of Tartarus, condemned to roll a massive boulder up a steep hill for all time, only to watch it roll back down just as he reaches the top, a punishment that has become the most famous image of futile labour in all of Western literature and philosophy.

Sophocles is the most successful and, in antiquity, the most beloved of the three great Athenian tragedians. He is the son of Sophillus, a wealthy armour-maker of Colonus, born near Athens around 496 BCE and educated in the aristocratic disciplines of music, poetry, athletics and public life. He is the young chorister who, still in his teens, led the victory paean after the Greek defeat of Persia at Salamis in 480 BCE. He is the dramatist who in 468 BCE won his first recorded victory over Aeschylus and then dominated the Athenian stage for almost sixty years. He is the public servant who served Athens as treasurer of the Delian League, elected general and later emergency commissioner, while also taking part in religious life and helping receive Asclepius into Attica. He is the theatrical innovator to whom ancient tradition attributes the introduction of the third actor, the enlargement of the chorus and the use of painted scenery, although these developments cannot be assigned to him with complete certainty. He is the author of more than 120 plays, of which seven survive complete: Ajax, Antigone, The Women of Trachis, Oedipus the King, Electra, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus. He is the poet whose Theban plays are not a trilogy and were not written in chronological order, but whose Oedipus the King became Aristotle's model of tragic structure and the most famous play in the Western tradition. He is the man who died in 406 or early 405, whose Oedipus at Colonus was produced after his death by his grandson and won first prize, and whose epitaph celebrated the watch he kept on the walls of Athens rather than the victories he won in the theatre.

The Greek Sphinx is the winged, woman-faced lion monster whose riddle brings death to Thebes until Oedipus solves it. She must be distinguished from the male, wingless Egyptian sphinx already represented elsewhere on Mythopouch. Hesiod calls the Theban monster Phix and places her in the monster genealogy connected with Orthrus, although the identity of her mother in that compressed passage is textually disputed. Pseudo-Apollodorus gives a different genealogy from Typhon and Echidna, says Hera sends her to Thebes and preserves the familiar riddle of the creature that moves on four, two and three feet at different stages of life. Sophocles assumes the audience knows the Sphinx and her riddle but does not quote its familiar wording. The monster's defeat wins Oedipus the Theban throne and Jocasta, turning an intellectual victory into the doorway to his tragedy.

Stheneboea is the queen of Tiryns whose unrequited desire for Bellerophon set in motion one of the most famous quests in Greek mythology. She is the daughter of Iobates, the king of Lycia, and the wife of Proetus, the king of Tiryns, a fortress city in the Argolid. She is the woman who desired the young Corinthian hero and, when he rejected her, accused him of assault before her husband, a lie that sent Bellerophon to Lycia with a sealed letter commanding his death. She is the figure who bridges the courts of Argos and Lycia, the daughter of one king and the wife of another, whose passion and pride nearly destroyed the greatest hero of his generation. She is the queen whose name was later changed to Anteia in some tellings, perhaps to distance her from the shame of her actions. And she is the warning that runs through Greek myth like a thread: the woman scorned is more dangerous than the monster in the field. Every false accusation born of wounded pride, every letter that carries a death sentence in innocent hands, echoes the story of Stheneboea.