Greek Mythology List

Antinous is the Bithynian youth who became the most famous beloved in Roman history and, after his death, the most widely worshipped new god the empire ever produced. He is the boy from the backwoods of Bithynia who caught the eye of Hadrian, the emperor who ruled the Mediterranean world, and who travelled with him from the Eleusinian Mysteries in Greece to the lion-haunted deserts of Libya. He is the young man who drowned in the Nile in October of 130 CE during the festival of Osiris, whose death was so sudden and so shrouded in mystery that ancient writers still argue whether it was accident, suicide, or ritual sacrifice to save the emperor's life. He is the god whom Hadrian deified without consulting the Senate, flooding the empire with more than two thousand statues that showed him as Osiris, as Dionysus, as Apollo, and as himself. He is the namesake of Antinoopolis, the Greek city that rose from the Nile mud on the very spot where he died, and whose cult outlasted Hadrian himself to become, for a time, a rival to Christianity across the eastern provinces.

Antinous is the chief suitor of Penelope, the most arrogant and dangerous of the hundred young nobles who filled Odysseus' palace for twenty years, consuming his wealth and pressuring his wife to choose a new husband. He is the son of Eupeithes, an Ithacan nobleman whose life Odysseus had once saved from a murderous mob, a debt of gratitude that Antinous repaid by plotting to kill Odysseus' own son. He is the man who organised the ambush against Telemachus, the prince who travelled to Pylos and Sparta to seek news of his father, and who would have died on the open sea if Athena had not warned him to take a different course. He is the suitor who threw a wooden stool at the beggar who turned out to be Odysseus in disguise, who mocked the ragged stranger and demanded he be driven from the hall. And he is the first man to die when the beggar finally strung the great bow, the man whose throat was pierced by an arrow while he lifted a golden cup to drink, never knowing that the king he had tried to replace had returned to reclaim his own.

Antiope is the Amazon queen who fell in love with the enemy, the daughter of Ares who betrayed her warrior sisters for a Greek hero and paid for that love with her life. She is the co-ruler of the Amazons, the fierce women who lived without men and fought with a skill that matched any army in Greece, who shared her throne with her sister Orithyia. She is the captive who became a bride, carried off by Theseus, the Athenian hero who slew the Minotaur in the labyrinth of Crete, during Heracles' ninth labour against her own people. She is the mother of Hippolytus, the boy who would grow up to worship Artemis and die because his stepmother Phaedra loved him. She is the warrior who fought at her husband's side when her own sisters came to burn Athens, who was struck down not by an Athenian spear but by an arrow from the Amazon Molpadia, one of her own. And she is the only Amazon who ever married, whose tomb was shown to visitors in Athens for centuries, a reminder that even the fiercest warrior can be undone by love.

Antiope is the Theban princess whose beauty was so great that Zeus, the king of the gods, disguised himself as a satyr to lie with her on the slopes of Mount Cithaeron. She is the daughter of Nycteus, the regent of Thebes, though some say her true father was Asopus, the river god whose waters run through Boeotia. She is the mother of Amphion and Zethus, the twin brothers who built the walls of Thebes, one charming the stones into place with his lyre while the other lifted them by the strength of his arms. She is the woman who fled her father's wrath only to fall into the hands of her uncle Lycus and his cruel wife Dirce, who kept her in chains and treated her as a slave for years. She is the prisoner whose chains were miraculously loosened by Zeus, who found shelter in the very house where her lost sons had grown to manhood, and who watched as those sons tied Dirce to a wild bull and avenged every lash and insult she had suffered. And she is the madwoman whom Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy, drove across the hills of Greece until a Phocian king named Phocus cured her, married her, and shared her grave for eternity.

Aphrodite is the Olympian goddess of love, beauty, and desire, the most beautiful of all the gods and the one whose power can bend the will of mortals and immortals alike. She was born from the sea foam that gathered around the severed genitals of the sky-god Uranus, cast into the ocean by his son the Titan Cronus, and rose from the waves at Cyprus as a fully grown woman of breathtaking beauty. She is the goddess whose bribe of the most beautiful mortal woman, Helen, to the Trojan prince Paris set in motion the ten-year Trojan War that destroyed a city and shaped the course of Greek legend. She is the wife of Hephaestus, the lame smith-god, and the lover of Ares, the god of war, whose adulterous affair was exposed when Hephaestus trapped them in an invisible net and called all the gods to witness their shame. And she is the mother of Aeneas, the Trojan prince whose descendants would one day found Rome, a legacy that carried her influence from the Greek world into the heart of the Roman Empire.

Aphrodite's Girdle is the enchanted sash that makes its wearer the most desirable being in the cosmos, the woven belt that can turn a mortal into an object of divine longing and bend even the will of the war god Ares to the wearer's charm. It is the gift that the goddess of love and beauty lent to Hera, the queen of Olympus and wife of Zeus, so that Hera could seduce her husband and turn the tide of the Trojan War in favour of the Greeks. It is the sash that Aphrodite herself wore when she tempted Anchises, the Trojan shepherd-prince, on the slopes of Mount Ida, a union that produced the hero Aeneas and the bloodline that would one day rule Rome. It is the girdle that the three Graces, the goddesses of beauty and charm, wove with their own hands from threads of desire, persuasion, and sweet longing. And it is the ancestor of every love charm, every enchanted jewel, and every magical garment in the history of storytelling, the original proof that beauty is not born but woven, and that desire itself can be crafted like cloth.

Apollo is the Olympian god of light, music, prophecy, archery, and healing, the most beautiful and complex of all the gods, a figure who embodies both creative harmony and sudden destruction. He was born on the floating island of Delos after his mother Leto wandered the earth for nine days, pursued by the jealous goddess Hera who forbade any land to shelter her. He is the god who slew the monstrous Python at Delphi, a serpent that had terrorized the earth, and claimed the site as his own oracle, the most famous in the ancient world. He is the musician whose lyre charmed the gods and whose musical contest with the satyr Marsyas ended in the satyr's flaying. He is the archer whose arrows brought plague upon the Greek camp at Troy and who guided the arrow that killed Achilles. And he is the god of unrequited love, the eternally beautiful youth who pursued the nymph Daphne until she was transformed into a laurel tree, a symbol of victory and poetic achievement that has crowned the brows of poets and conquerors for three thousand years.

Apollo's Bow and Arrows are the silver weapon of the god of archery, music, and prophecy, the instrument with which he struck down the monstrous serpent Python and claimed the oracle of Delphi for his own. They are the arrows that rained plague upon the Greek army at Troy when their king Agamemnon insulted the priest of Apollo, and the same arrows that could heal the sick and drive away disease when the god chose to show mercy. They are the weapon that Apollo shared with his twin sister Artemis, the virgin goddess of the hunt, and together they used their silver bows to slaughter the children of Queen Niobe, who had boasted that she was greater than their mother. They are the bow that appears in the hands of every statue of Apollo from the archaic kouroi of Greece to the marble gods of Rome, the symbol of his power to strike from a distance, to see the future, and to decide who lives and who dies. And they are the ancestor of every divine weapon in Western storytelling that carries both destruction and healing in the same shaft, the original proof that the hand that wounds is the hand that cures.

Pseudo-Apollodorus is the conventional name given to the unknown author of the Bibliotheca, or Library, the most comprehensive surviving prose handbook of Greek mythology. He is not Apollodorus of Athens, the 2nd-century BCE scholar whose genuine works include the Chronicle, On the Gods and a commentary on Homer's Catalogue of Ships. He is the compiler whose work begins with Sky, Earth and the Titans and continues through the births of the gods, the wars of Zeus, the families of Deucalion and Inachus, the labours of Heracles, the voyage of the Argonauts, the Theban and Trojan wars and the wanderings of Odysseus. He is the mythographer who organised mythology through genealogy, moving from divine families to heroic houses and allowing every myth to locate itself within a family tree. He is the writer who preserved variants from Homer, Hesiod, Pherecydes, Acusilaus, Hellanicus, Pindar, the tragedians and lost epic cycles, sometimes naming his source and sometimes silently combining conflicting traditions. He is the author whose work survives in an incomplete medieval tradition and depends, for its final portion, on later summaries conventionally called the Epitome. And he is the figure whom modern readers must not confuse with the historical Apollodorus of Athens: the name Apollodorus in the title of the Bibliotheca is an ancient attribution, not a secure authorship. The accurate modern designation is Pseudo-Apollodorus.

Apollonius of Tyana is the wandering sage who travelled from the Black Sea to the Ganges, who raised the dead and cast out demons, and who vanished from a Roman courtroom rather than submit to an emperor's death sentence. He is the Cappadocian nobleman who gave up his wealth to follow the way of Pythagoras, the ancient philosopher who believed that the soul is immortal, that all living things are kin, and that a man who eats flesh cannot commune with the divine. He is the teacher who entered Rome in defiance of Nero's ban on philosophers, who debated with Brahmins in India and gymnosophists in Ethiopia, and who warned the people of Ephesus that a plague was coming in the form of a beggar who was not a man at all. He is the prisoner who stood before the tyrant Domitian and spoke truth to power, then simply disappeared from his chains and reappeared three days' journey away. And he is the man whose biography, written two centuries after his death, became the most controversial book in the ancient world, a pagan life so full of miracles that Christian writers spent centuries arguing whether he was a rival to Jesus or merely a fiction.

Apsyrtus is the prince of Colchis whose own sister cut him into pieces and threw him into the sea to buy her escape. He is the son of Aeetes, the king who guarded the Golden Fleece, and the grandson of Helios, the sun god whose chariot blazes across the sky each day. He is the brother of Medea, the sorceress who betrayed her father, stole the fleece, and murdered her kin rather than be caught. He is the golden-armoured commander who led the Colchian fleet in pursuit of the Argo, who wore the shield of his grandfather and drove the chariot of the sun across the battlefield. He is the young man lured to a lonely island by his sister's false promise of peace, ambushed by Jason at the temple of Artemis, and hacked to pieces so that his vengeful ghost could not follow his killers. And he is the namesake of the Absyrtides Islands, the cape that bears his name, and the city of Tomi where his blood stained the shore, a prince whose death was so terrible that even the gods demanded purification for those who caused it.

Aquarius is the water-bearer of the zodiac, the figure imagined pouring a celestial stream from a jar towards the Southern Fish. The constellation is real, but the identity assigned to its figure belongs to mythology and the history of star lore. One Greek interpretation connects it with Ganymede, the Trojan youth carried away to become cupbearer to the gods. Other ancient writers identify the water-bearer with Deucalion, the survivor of a great flood, or with Cecrops, the early Athenian king remembered for offering water in sacrifice. Behind these Greek explanations lies a wider history of water-bearing imagery, including Mesopotamian representations associated with Ea, the god of fresh water and wisdom. Aquarius therefore does not have one continuous biography or one universally agreed divine identity. Its stories bring together the pouring of a drink, the abundance and danger of water, and the effort to recognise familiar actions among the stars. The ordinary act of emptying a vessel becomes a meeting point between human life and the imagined heavens.