10.1 — Greek and Roman Myth

The most-referenced mythology in Western art, literature and psychology, and the one where the family tree is genuinely confusing until somebody draws it.

Getting the structure straight

Are the Greek and Roman gods the same?

Mostly the same figures with different names, because the Romans identified their own older Italian deities with the Greek ones they encountered and absorbed the stories wholesale.

Greek	Roman	Domain
Zeus	Jupiter	sky, king of gods
Hera	Juno	marriage, queen
Poseidon	Neptune	sea
Hades	Pluto	underworld
Athena	Minerva	wisdom, strategy
Ares	Mars	war
Aphrodite	Venus	love
Hephaestus	Vulcan	forge
Artemis	Diana	hunt, moon
Apollo	Apollo	light, music, prophecy
Hermes	Mercury	messenger, travellers, thieves
Demeter	Ceres	harvest
Dionysus	Bacchus	wine, ecstasy
Cronus	Saturn	time, the previous generation

The characters shift in the transfer. Ares was disliked by the Greeks — a brutal, cowardly figure — while Mars was a dignified father of the Roman people and second only to Jupiter. That difference tells you a good deal about the two cultures.

The planets carry the Roman names, which is why the days of the week in Romance languages map onto them, per 2.7.

What is the order of generations?

Three, each overthrowing the last, and the pattern is the point.

First: Chaos, then Gaia (earth) and Uranus (sky). Second: the Titans, children of Gaia and Uranus, led by Cronus — who overthrows his father at his mother's instigation. Third: the Olympians, children of Cronus, led by Zeus, who overthrows Cronus.

Cronus swallowed each of his children at birth because he had been warned one would depose him. Rhea, his wife, hid the youngest and gave him a stone wrapped in cloth instead. That youngest was Zeus, who grew up, forced Cronus to disgorge the others, and won the ten-year war that followed.

The three brothers then divided the world by lot: Zeus the sky, Poseidon the sea, Hades the underworld, with the earth shared.

Notice the structure: every generation is overthrown by its own children, and every attempt to prevent it causes it. That shape recurs across mythologies and is one of the reasons psychoanalysis found the material so useful.

Why is Athena born from Zeus's head?

Because Zeus was avoiding the pattern above, and failed differently.

He was warned that his consort Metis would bear a child greater than him. So he swallowed Metis. She was already pregnant, and the child continued to develop inside him, eventually causing a headache so severe that Hephaestus split his skull open with an axe — and Athena stepped out fully grown and armoured.

She becomes his favourite child and never challenges him, which is the resolution: the prophecy was avoided by absorbing the threat rather than destroying it.

Athena is worth understanding because she is not simply a war goddess. She represents war as strategy, craft and civic defence, against Ares as violence — and she is also the goddess of weaving, pottery, olive cultivation and the city itself. Athens is named for her, after a contest with Poseidon in which he produced a saltwater spring and she produced the olive tree, and the citizens chose the more useful gift.

The stories that get referenced

What are the twelve labours of Heracles?

Heracles — Hercules in Latin — was driven mad by Hera, who hated him as Zeus's son by another woman, and killed his own wife and children. The labours are his penance, imposed by a king he was made to serve.

The list, in the usual order: kill the Nemean lion, whose hide was impenetrable, so he strangled it and afterwards wore the skin. Kill the Hydra, which grew two heads for each one cut off, solved by cauterising the stumps. Capture the Ceryneian hind, sacred to Artemis. Capture the Erymanthian boar. Clean the Augean stables in one day, done by diverting two rivers through them. Drive off the Stymphalian birds. Capture the Cretan bull. Steal the mares of Diomedes. Take the girdle of Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons. Take the cattle of Geryon. Fetch the apples of the Hesperides. And bring back Cerberus, the three-headed dog guarding the underworld, alive.

The number was originally ten. Two were disallowed on technicalities — he had help with the Hydra, and he was paid for the stables — so two more were added, which is a detail that tells you these were being catalogued by people who cared about rules.

What is the Trojan War about?

A dispute between three goddesses that becomes a ten-year siege.

At a wedding, Eris — discord — throws in a golden apple marked "for the fairest". Hera, Athena and Aphrodite each claim it. Zeus sensibly refuses to judge and delegates to Paris, a Trojan prince. Each goddess offers a bribe: Hera offers power, Athena offers wisdom and victory in battle, Aphrodite offers the most beautiful woman in the world.

He takes Aphrodite's offer. The woman is Helen, already married to Menelaus, king of Sparta. Paris takes her to Troy, and Menelaus's brother Agamemnon assembles a Greek expedition — bound by an oath every one of Helen's former suitors had sworn to defend whoever married her.

Ten years of siege follow, described in 9.1. The city falls to the wooden horse, and the story then continues in the returns: Odysseus takes ten more years to get home, and Agamemnon is murdered by his wife on arrival, which sets off the Oresteia.

Troy was found. Heinrich Schliemann excavated a site at Hisarlik in Turkey from 1870 and identified it as Troy, and the identification is now generally accepted — though Schliemann dug through the relevant layer to reach an older one and did substantial damage.

What are the stories everyone half-remembers?

Pandora was given a jar — not a box; the mistranslation is from a sixteenth-century Latin version — containing all the evils, and opened it. Hope was left inside, and what that means has been argued about for 2,500 years: a consolation retained, or the one thing withheld from humanity.

Prometheus stole fire for humanity and was chained to a rock where an eagle ate his liver daily, which regrew. He is the type of the benefactor punished, and Mary Shelley subtitled Frankenstein "The Modern Prometheus".

Icarus flew on wings of feathers and wax, ignored his father's instruction not to fly too high, and fell when the sun melted them. The instruction was also not to fly too low, where sea spray would soak the feathers — the story is about the middle path, and the second half is usually dropped.

Sisyphus was condemned to roll a boulder uphill forever, and it rolls back each time. Camus used him as the image of absurd existence and concluded that one must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection. Echo could only repeat others' words. Midas turned everything he touched to gold, including his food and, in some versions, his daughter. Orpheus went to the underworld for his wife, was permitted to lead her out on condition he not look back, and looked back at the threshold.

Theseus killed the Minotaur in the labyrinth and found his way out with Ariadne's thread — and then abandoned her on an island, and forgot to change his sail, causing his father to throw himself into the sea.

Oedipus killed his father and married his mother, both without knowing, in the course of trying to escape the prophecy that said he would. Cassandra was given true prophecy and the curse that nobody would believe her.

What the myths are for

Why do the Greek gods behave so badly?

Because they were not moral exemplars and were never meant to be.

Greek religion was about practice rather than belief: sacrifice, festival and civic ritual. There was no scripture, no creed, no requirement to think anything particular about the gods, and no expectation that they were good. They were powerful, and the point of the stories was to explain how the world came to be as it is — often uncomfortable, arbitrary and unjust.

Plato objected to exactly this and proposed censoring the poets for it. The objection is evidence that the material was not devotional, since nobody needs to censor scripture on those grounds.

Roman religion was even more practical: correct performance of ritual maintained the pax deorum, the peace with the gods, and getting the words wrong invalidated it. Belief was not the operative category.

What do the constellations have to do with this?

Nearly all the northern constellation names are Greek myths, and the reason they stuck is Ptolemy.

Ptolemy's Almagest, in the second century CE, catalogued 48 constellations with Greek mythological names, and it was the standard astronomical reference in Europe and the Islamic world for over a thousand years. When the sky was formally divided into 88 official constellations in 1922, the old names were kept.

So Orion is a hunter killed by a scorpion, which is why Scorpius is on the opposite side of the sky and the two are never visible at once. Cassiopeia was a queen punished for vanity, placed in the sky so that she spends half of every night upside down. Callisto and Arcas became the Great and Little Bears, which is where the word Arctic comes from, per 5.3.

Many of the individual star names are Arabic, not Greek — Betelgeuse, Rigel, Aldebaran, Altair, Deneb, Vega — because the catalogues passed through Arabic astronomy on their way back to Europe.

Which English words come from Greek myth?

More than any other mythology, because the material was the shared reference of educated Europe for centuries.

Panic from Pan, whose sudden appearance caused irrational terror. Chaos, echo, erotic (Eros), martial (Mars), jovial (Jupiter, whose astrological influence was cheerful), mercurial, saturnine, volcano (Vulcan), cereal (Ceres), museum and music (the Muses), atlas (Atlas, whose image was printed in early map books), titanic, herculean, narcissism, nemesis, hypnosis (Hypnos), morphine (Morpheus), tantalise (Tantalus, punished with food and water just out of reach), siren, hygiene (Hygieia), psychology (Psyche), ocean (Oceanus), phobia (Phobos), and Europe itself.

The medical profession has two of them and uses the wrong one. The caduceus, a staff with two snakes and wings, belongs to Hermes and is associated with commerce and thieves. The Rod of Asclepius, a plain staff with one snake, is the medical symbol. American medical organisations widely adopted the caduceus in the nineteenth century by mistake, and the error is now entrenched.

What comes next

The next page goes north, to a mythology whose gods know they are going to lose, and where that knowledge is the entire theme.