Greek Mythology

Greek mythology gathers the stories of gods and heroes told across the Aegean world, first set down around the 8th century BCE in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and Hesiod's Theogony. Hesiod traces the divine genealogy from primal Chaos through Uranus and Gaia, Cronus and his swallowed children, to the kingship of Zeus; Homer sets the Olympian gods quarreling and intervening over the battlefield of Troy.

At the center stand the twelve gods of Mount Olympus, with the Titans and primordial powers behind them, nymphs, centaurs, and a menagerie of monsters below, and demigod heroes such as Heracles, Perseus, and Theseus binding the divine family to the royal houses of Greece. The gods have vivid tempers and appetites — they envy, quarrel, and take revenge — yet even they bow to fate. Myth was woven into civic life: the oracle at Delphi, the games at Olympia, and the temples of the Athenian acropolis all fixed the stories to particular ground.

Athenian tragedy of the 5th century BCE reworked the myths into moral drama on stage, and Ovid's Metamorphoses carried them into Rome and medieval Europe. Since the Renaissance they have remained the most heavily drawn-upon store of subjects in Western painting, sculpture, and literature, and the names of the gods and heroes persist in the constellations and in scientific vocabulary, while the planets carry the same gods' names, mostly in their Roman forms.