According to most traditions, she was born from Zeus's head fully formed and armored. She was depicted crowned with a crested helm, armed with shield and a spear, and wearing the aegis over a long dress. Poets describe her as "grey-eyed" or having especially bright, keen eyes.
She was a special patron of heroes such as Odysseus. She was also the patron of the city Athens which was named after her Her symbol is the olive tree.
She is commonly shown accompanied by her sacred animal, the owl. The Romans identified her with Minerva. Goddess of grain, agriculture and the harvest, growth and nourishment. Demeter is a daughter of Cronus and Rhea and sister of Zeus, by whom she bore Persephone. She was one of the main deities of the Eleusinian Mysteries, in which her power over the life cycle of plants symbolized the passage of the human soul through its life course and into the afterlife.
She was depicted as a mature woman, often crowned and holding sheafs of wheat and a torch. Her symbols are the cornucopia, wheat-ears, the winged serpent, and the lotus staff. Her sacred animals are pigs and snakes.
Ceres was her Roman counterpart. God of wine, parties and festivals, madness, chaos, drunkenness, drugs, and ecstasy. The idea was originally from ancient Chios.
This was his "home". He was depicted in art as either an older bearded god or a pretty effeminate, long-haired youth. His attributes include the thyrsus a pinecone-tipped staff , drinking cup, grape vine, and a crown of ivy. He is often in the company of his thiasos, a posse of attendants including satyrs, maenads, and his old tutor Silenus. The consort of Dionysus was Ariadne. Animals sacred to him include dolphins, serpents, tigers, and donkeys. A later addition to the Olympians, in some accounts he replaced Hestia.
Bacchus was another name for him in Greek, and came into common usage among the Romans. King of the underworld and the dead, and god of regret. His consort is Persephone. His attributes are the drinking horn or cornucopia, key, sceptre, and the three-headed dog Cerberus. The screech owl was sacred to him. He was one of three sons of Cronus and Rhea, and thus sovereign over one of the three realms of the universe, the underworld.
As a chthonic god, however, his place among the Olympians is ambiguous. In the mystery religions and Athenian literature, Pluto Plouton, "the Rich" was his preferred name, with Hades more common for the underworld as a place. Crippled god of fire, metalworking, and crafts.
Husband to Aphrodite. Either the son of Zeus and Hera or Hera alone, he is the smith of the gods and the husband of the adulterous Aphrodite. He was usually depicted as a bearded man with hammer, tongs and anvil—the tools of a smith—and sometimes riding a donkey. His sacred animals are the donkey, the guard dog and the crane. Among his creations was the armor of Achilles. Hephaestus used the fire of the forge as a creative force, but his Roman counterpart Vulcan was feared for his destructive potential and associated with the volcanic power of the earth.
Queen of the gods and goddess of marriage, women, childbirth, heirs, kings, and empires. Meaning in Greek "the Unseen One," Hades isn't so much a name as a description. This euphemism—that is, a nice way of saying a bad thing—betrays a certain superstitious reluctance on the part of the Greeks to refer to this god by his actual name, whatever that was, since to call him by name was to invoke him and thereby death. In that vein, the Greeks also called him Pluto from their word ploutos "wealth" because they credited him in part with the fertility of crops, the richness of the earth and its mineral resources, especially gold.
Demeter is the goddess of grain and agriculture, whose name is sometimes rendered in Greek Da-meter meaning "Earth-mother. Demeter was important enough in this native culture to have been absorbed by the invading Greeks and included among the principal Olympians. In support of this hypothesis, most of her myths have a primitive aura about them and she's largely absent from later legends and myth. The great exception to that is the Eleusinian Mysteries , an influential cult which survived well into Roman times and in which Demeter played a central role.
Because it was a mystery cult whose devotees were sworn to secrecy, we today don't know exactly what the Eleusinian Mysteries entailed, but there can be little doubt they revolved around the most important myth in the Demeter cycle, the rape of Persephone see above, Hades. Aphrodite is the goddess of sexual love and beauty. According to one story she was born as a result of Cronus' revolt against his father Uranus. After Cronus castrated Uranus and flung his genitals into the ocean, Aphrodite arose from the foam of the sea that formed around Uranus' dismembered organs, a story stimulated, no doubt, by the interpretation of her name as "foam aphro - born - dite ," a dubious etymology.
The goddess floated to shore on a shell, inspiring among other things one of the Renaissance painter Botticelli's most famous paintings. A tamer version of her birth co-exists alongside this in Greek myth, that she was the child of Zeus and Dione, not Hera but a demi-goddess of that name. Although she was technically wed to the ugly Hephaestus, Aphrodite had liaisons with quite a few gods and mortals and is the only one of the Olympian goddesses outside of Demeter to have children by mortals, e.
As such, she was a popular goddess and appears in many Greek myths. In some she assists young lovers, but more often she's depicted as vengeful and angry, chastising those who defy or deny her. Her punishments are often highly creative and unusual.
For instance, the women of the island Lemnos ignored her, and so she made them all smell so bad that their husbands divorced them and imported new foreign wives. Out of madness and frustration the Lemnian women killed all the men on their island, hardly a well thought-out solution to the problem. The women were then left alone and lonely on their island until the Argonauts happened by and solved their problem, incidentally repopulating the island at the same time.
Despite her eternal youth and beauty, Aphrodite was a very ancient goddess, perhaps borrowed by the Greeks from their eastern neighbors. Originally a mother-goddess, a type worshiped widely throughout the ancient Near East, Aphrodite bears close resemblance in many ways to the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar or the Canaanite Ashtoreth Astarte.
For example, Aphrodite's priestesses in several Greek towns were prostitutes just as Ishtar's. According to Herodotus, the worship of Mylitta, Aphrodite's equivalent in Babylon, required that women offer themselves at least once during their lives in the goddess' temple to strange men for any price. This, Herodotus notes with a smirk, posed a problem for ugly women who might have to remain in the temple for many years awaiting an offer. In general, Aphrodite is treated rather lightly by the Greeks, especially Homer who makes her subordinate to Hera and Athena.
A famous exception is Euripides' portrait of the goddess in his tragic masterpiece Hippolytus , where she emerges as all-powerful and highly dangerous. Also, the Romans who called her Venus worshiped her with great solemnity. The god of fire and the forge, Hephaestus is one of the few legitimate children of Zeus and Hera. According to a different story, Hera grew angry at Zeus' perpetual infidelity and gave birth to Hephaestus parthenogenetically, that is, without her husband's involvement.
Either way Hephaestus was largely ignored by his father along with the majority of ancient poets and playwrights.
Indeed, so preternaturally ugly and lame, the new-born baby Hephaestus was flung out of Olympus by his own mother disgusted at his deformity. He fell for many days, according to myth, finally landing on the island of Lemnos where there was a cult to him in antiquity.
Hephaestus is associated with volcanic eruptions, often accredited to his working in a smithy deep below the earth. He was best known for his many inventive creations, for instance, the shield of Achilles The Iliad , Book 18 , palaces for the gods and golden robots which speak and think and assisted him in his work at the forge. Most myths concerning Hephaestus center around his wife Aphrodite. Having been awarded her as wife in order to prevent a violent quarrel among the other more powerful and handsome gods who wanted her, Hephaestus won last place in her heart, a sentiment she proved by having numerous affairs.
Homer, for instance, describes in The Odyssey Book 8 how Hephaestus thought he'd gotten revenge on her for her frequent infidelities. He trapped her and her current lover, Ares the god of war, in bed by dropping a mesh of chains on them as they were making love. The indignant cuckold then called the gods to the scene—the goddesses refused to come out of shame—to witness her adultery.
Some gods laughed, others expressed their disgust, but none refused to look at the naked Aphrodite and in the back Apollo whispered to Hermes, "Would you suffer these humiliating chains, if you could lie down with golden Aphrodite? Ares is the god of war and an exceptionally unpleasant character. In many stories he's little more than a bully and a butcher, loved only by Hades because he's the death-god's best wholesale supplier.
Like Hephaestus, Ares is the son of Zeus and Hera and further evidence that his parents' marriage wasn't a very good match. Moreover, for all his vainglorious boasting Ares isn't very successful in war. In mythological combat, he's defeated by his sister Athena, the hero Heracles four times!
When he complains of his mistreatment to his father, Zeus calls him a two-faced brute, tells him to quit whining and says that his quarrelsome nature comes from his mother Hera, and that if he were not his son he would have kicked him out of Olympus long ago.
The Greeks' scorn of war comes through clearly in this depiction of Ares, and in the fact that archaeologists have found relatively few shrines to him in Greece. Most of his centers of worship were in northern Greece from which this deity may have been exported to the cities of the south. As a deity of war, Athena was far preferable to most Greeks, especially in Athens the city named after her. Also a goddess of wisdom and crafts, her prominence is at least in part due to Athens' dominance of our historical and literary sources.
Had we more records from ancient cities outside of Athens, we would, no doubt, see a more balanced picture of Athena. As it is, she comes across as a strong, virgin goddess, the protectress and patron of civilized man against errant barbarians. The personification of ingenuity and genius, she is attributed with inspiring such remarkable inventions as the Trojan horse, the double flute, the ship Argo, the magic bridle used to harness the flying horse Pegasus and the mirrored shield with which Perseus killed the Gorgon Medusa.
Her wisdom was, thus, rarely the abstract sort we tend to associate with philosophers and poets, more often the practical kind linked with cunning and technical expertise. Athena was born in a highly unusual manner. Her father Zeus ate her mother Metis "Wisdom" in fear that the pregnant Metis would give birth to a child who would be greater than he was. Metis survived, however—she was clever, after all—living on in Zeus' head where eventually she went into labor causing Zeus to have a great headache.
Hephaestus—or in some stories the Titan Prometheus—split Zeus' skull open and out came the goddess Athena fully grown and armed. In art she can be identified by her crested helmet, spear and shield emblazoned with a Gorgon's head, a present from Perseus for her help in killing the Medusa.
She's also often depicted with an owl, the bird that symbolized wisdom and her city Athens. Sometimes she's called Pallas Athena in memory of her childhood friend Pallas whom she killed accidently while playing war-games. Apollo represents a wide amalgam of powers and attributes. He's the god of the sun, wisdom, prophesy, music, flocks, wolves, mice, entrances, plagues and medicine.
How he came to be included in the Greek pantheon and was introduced to Greece is not at all clear, but some historical data suggest he may have been an eastern god originally—possibly Apulunas, a god of the Hittites who occupied central Asia Minor Turkey in the second millennium BCE—though the ancient Greeks linked him with the peoples of the far North.
Whatever the truth, it's evident from both the many spheres he controls and his other names, Loxias see below and Phoebus —sometimes combined with Apollo to make "Phoebus Apollo"—that he represents the conflation of several deities, native and foreign perhaps. The story of his birth is one of the most famous myths in the Greek canon.
His mother the Titaness Leto was impregnated by Zeus, extra-maritally as usual. When Hera discovered this, she became enraged and wished to prevent the birth of Leto's child—or children, as it turned out, since Leto had twins, Apollo and Artemis. When she felt their birth coming on, Leto searched for a place to have her children, but out of fear of Hera's anger no place would receive her until she came to the island Delos in the Aegean Sea east of Greece.
She persuaded the island to allow her to stay there with the promise that it would become an important center of worship. There under a palm tree she gave birth to Apollo and Artemis, and henceforth the island was sacred to Apollo. Despite his birth on Delos, Apollo was more closely associated with Delphi in central Greece on the northern shore of the Gulf of Corinth. There, as a precocious babe of only four days, Apollo killed a huge snake named Pytho and established a center of worship in Delphi from which he prophesied.
This so-called Oracle of Delphi was maintained by a succession of prophetesses, each called the Pythia after the snake, lasting well into historical times. The Pythia often spoke in riddles, words which were true but hid their truth from plain view in some way. One of the most famous prophesies of the Oracle of Delphi was that delivered to King Croesus of Lydia who asked the Pythia what would happen if he attacked the Persians. The oracle replied that "a great kingdom will fall. Only too late he realized that the "kingdom" the oracle meant was his own!
Thus, as the god of prophesy, Apollo is often called Loxias "slanting". Apollo was very popular in the Classical Age and appears often in later myth and literature. He provided much fodder for myth-making in that he had many love affairs with women, nymphs and young men and was heavily involved in the Trojan War and its aftermath. He's often held up as the ideal—or the anomaly—of the perfect male according to the classical Greeks.
Despite his personal excesses and often outrageous behavior, he preached a philosophy of self-awareness and moderation seen on his temple in Delphi which bore the inscriptions "Know yourself" and "Nothing in excess. Apollo's twin sister Artemis is both his antithesis and counterpart. She represents the moon, where he represents the sun; she darkness, he light; she primitive chastity, he civilized intercourse; she the child, he the adult; she black magic, he science; she death, he healing.
Yet in spite of their fundamental differences the brother and sister share some important similarities. Both are often depicted carrying a bow and arrows and both are associated with plagues. In later mythology she was given the name Phoebe, the feminine form of her brother's alternate name Phoebus. In origin, she may be related to eastern goddesses, such as the Minoan "mistress of the wild beasts" or the Phrygian Cybele, another "mistress of the wild.
The story of Artemis' birth is the same as her brother Apollo's. Compared to Apollo, however, there are few myths involving her. The rites of hospitality are also under their protection. They are generally represented with their horses Xanthus and Cyllarus, as in the celebrated colossal group of Monte Cavallo in Rome.
Their characteristic emblem is an oval helmet crowned with a star. The worship of Castor and Pollux was from early times current among the tribes of Italy. They enjoyed especial honours in Tusculum and Rome. In the latter city a considerable temple was built to them near the Forum B. In this building, generally called simply the temple of Castor, the senate of ten held its sittings. It was in their honour, too, that the solemn review of the Roman equites was held on the 15th July. The names of Castor and Pollux, like that of Hercules, were often in use as familiar expletives, but the name of Castor was invoked by women only.
They were worshipped as gods of the sea, particularly in Ostia, the harbour town of Rome. Their image is to be seen stamped on the reverse of the oldest Roman silver coins. The post-Homeric story represented her as carried off, while still a maiden, by Theseus, to the Attic fortress of Aphidnae, where she bore him a daughter Iphigeneia.
She was afterwards set free by her brothers, who took her back to Sparta. She was wooed by numbers of suitors, and at length gave her hand to Menelaus, by whom she became the mother of one child, Hermione. In the absence of her husband she was carried away to Troy by Paris the son of Priamus, taking with her much treasure. This was the origin of the Trojan War. The Trojans, in spite of the calamity she had brought upon them, loved her for her beauty, and refused to restore her to her husband.
She, however, lamented the fickleness of her youth, and yearned for her home, her husband, and her daughter.
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