Greek Mythology T to Z

 Yes, this month's A to Z challenge ended today, so here are the last sketches o complete the alphabet.

T is for Theseus. The Athenian answer to Heracles. Theseus killed the Minotaur with the help of King Minos’ daughter Ariadne. On the way home the ship stopped briefly on Naxos where Ariadne was abducted by the God Dionysus. Stricken with grief, Theseus failed to remember to change the colour of his sails from black to white, and his father, King Aegeus, taking this as a sig of Theseus’ death, hurled himself to his death in the sea which now bears his name. Like other heroes, Theseus became proud and vain as he aged. With his drinking buddy Pirithous he first abducted the young Helen (later Hele of Troy) who was rescued by her brothers, the twins Castor and Polydeuces. Then they tried to abduct the Goddess Persephone from the Underworld. Pirithous was taken to eternal punishment. Theseus was sat on a rock from which he could not move, until rescued by Heracles who was on his final task at the time.

U is for Ulysses. Ulysses is essentially the Roman name for the hero Odysseus, and it’s by this name I will refer to him. Odysseus was a major player in the Trojan War, who came up with the strategy of using the wooden horse to defeat the Trojans. After he has blinded the Cyclops Polyphemus, son of Poseidon, Zeus forbids Poseidon from taking Odysseus’ life, but permits him to put obstacles in his path which prevent him from returning home for 10 years. Odysseus overcomes these obstacles through his great cunning and intelligence, primarily.

V is for Vesta. Vesta is the Roman equivalent of Hestia, the Goddess of hearth and home. Her worship was organised by the famous Vestals in Rome, the sacred virgins, and as a result Vesta had a much more exalted place within the Roman pantheon than Hestia had among the Olympians.

W is for Wisdom and also for War. The Goddess of Wisdom and also the Goddess of War, Athena, had a remarkable birth. Zeus learned that the next child of his first wife Metis might overthrown him. He swallowed her whole. One day he had a splitting headache and asked Hephaestos to open his head with an axe. Out sprang the fully formed Athena fully armed, with ever present helmet. Zeus has the utmost respect and pride for Athena. Athens was named after her. She helped the hero Perseus to kill the gorgon Medusa, and Medusa’s head has been placed on the boss of Medusa’s shield. Being Goddess of Wisdom, Athena is never swayed by love, and like Artemis remains a virgin.

X is for the  River StyX ferryman, Charon. Charon, whose name does start with X in the original Greek, is a psychopomp. Psychopomps are spirits in different mythologies whose duty it is to escort souls of the newly dead to the afterlife. He expected the fee of an obolos coin, and those buried without such a coin had to wait on the shore of the River Styx for 100 years before he would carry them. Charon also conveys the living Heracles and Theseus back to the living world across the Styx when Heracles is on his 12^th and last labour. Charon also fulfilled the same function in Dante’s Inferno in the Divine Comedy. Although a Christian story, The Inferno uses many images from Greek Mythology.

Y is for Iapetus . This is a bit of a cheat, but at least the name sounds as if it starts with a Y! Iapetus was a titan, and the father of both Prometheus and Atlas. Iapetus was a brother of Cronus and was imprisoned in Tartarus by Zeus and his brothers. His children were identified with the ancestors of mankind, and this has led to him also being connected with Japheth, Noah’s son.

Z is for Zeus – who else? Youngest and most powerful of the children of Cronus, when portioning out the three domains of the world following the deposition of the Titans, Zeus chose the Heavens where he resides in Olympus. Although married to his sister Hera, his Queen, he is prodigiously unfaithful, having a daughter with his other sister, Demeter, and other children with a whole army of minor goddesses, nymphs and human women. Zeus’ weapon is the thunderbolts, fashioned for him by the Cyclopes. He respects human bravery, but can be capricious, and is just as likely to place obstacles in a hero’s path. He can be quick tempered, and will punish pride and disrespect in those he has previously shown favour towards. Zeus looks especially kindly on the requests of his daughter Athena, and it is Zeus who decrees that the age of Heroes will end with the conclusion of the Trojan War.

 

Greek Mythology - F to S

F is for the Fates, otherwise known as the Moirai. The role of the Moirai was to ensure that every being, mortal and divine, lived out their destiny as it was assigned to them by the laws of the universe. For mortals, this destiny spanned their entire lives, and was represented as a thread spun from a spindle. Clotho would spin the thread, Lachesis would measure it to the allotted length, and Atropos (from which we get the word atrophy) would cut it off at the right point.

G is for Geryon. For the 10^th labour of Heracles, the hero was sent to obtain the cattle of Geryon. Geryon was represented as a monster with a tripartite nature – either with three heads and one body, three bodies and three heads, or three bodies and one head. Heracles defeated the monster, in at least one version using his arrows that he had dipped in the venomous blood of the Hydra during an earlier task.

H is for Heracles. Heracles was the greatest hero of Greek Mythology. The son of Zeus and Alcmene, he showed his tremendous strength when just hours old. Hera, Queen of the Gods, sent snakes to kill him, and he strangled them. Heracles is most famous for performing 12 tasks for his cousin Eurystheus. Prior to this he had been driven temporarily mad by Hera, and killed his wife, Megara. The Twelve Tasks were a penance for the murder. Upon his death, Heracles was taken to Olympus, where it transpired that he was the prophesied hero who would defeat the Giants that Mother Earth had been nurturing to overthrow the Olympians. The sketch is based on a statue showing Herakles fighting the centaur, Nessus, who tried to abduct Herakles’ second wife, Deinara.

I is for Icarus. Icarus was a young man when he was taken to Crete by his father Daedalus, when he was hired by King Minos to build the labyrinth to house the Minotaur. Afraid that Daedalus would tell people the secrets of the labyrinth, Minos treacherously imprisoned him and Icarus in a tall tower. Daedalus managed to fashion wings from wax and from feathers from birds alighting on their windowsill. He warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun or the wax would melt. Icarus became too exhilarated in the joy of flight, and forgetting his father’s warning, swooped up to the sun, where his wings melted, and he fell to the sea where he drowned.

J is for Jason. Jason was the hero of the quest for the Golden Fleece. With the help of Hera, he commissioned the building of the ship The Argo, and, crewed with the mightiest heroes of the day, the ship sailed to Colchis through unimaginable perils. There he enlisted the help of the sorceress Medea, who had fallen in love with him, and together they managed to take the fleece. In later years Jason fell out of love with Medea and sought to marry the daughter of the King of Corinth. In acts of revenge, Medea killed his wife to be, and the two sons she, Medea, had borne Jason. Because of his faithless actions towards Medea, Hera withdrew her support for Jason, and one day, while sleeping n the shadow of the Argo, the ship’s prow rotted away and fell on his head, killing him. This is based on the poster for the 1960s film “Jason and the Argonauts” which is a film I absolutely loved as a kid. Now its monsters look jerky and unrealistic, but it was absolutely state of the art when it was made.

K is for Kronos, or Cronus. He overthrew his father, Ouranos (Uranus) and ruled the Titans. He had heard a prophecy that he would be overthrown by his children, and so every time that his wife Rhea gave birth, he ate the child alive. When Rhea gave birth to Zeus, her youngest child, she hid him, and presented Cronus with a stone, wrapped in blankets. His grandmother, the Earth, hid Zeus under Mount Ida, where he was fed by a she-goat, Amalthea. Once of age, Zeus forced Cronus to vomit up his brothers and sisters, and they waged war upon the Titans, imprisoning many of them in Tartarus in the depths of the Underworld. There are different versions of the fate of Cronus, but some believe that he was the original of the allegorical figure of Old Father Time.

L is for Laocoon. Laocoon was the high priest of Troy. When the Greeks departed from the shore below Troy, leaving the figure of a gigantic wooden horse behind them, Laocoon begged the Trojans to set fire to it, in case it was a trick – which indeed it was. Poseidon, God of the Sea, at the request of the Goddess Athena, sent two gigantic sea serpents that strangled Laocoon and his two sons. The Trojans interpreted this as divine retribution for his disrespect towards the Greeks’ gift, and sealed their own doom by opening the gates and pulling the horse – full of hidden Greek soldiers- into the city.

M is for Minotaur. King Minos of Crete prayed to the God Poseidon to send him a white bull so he could sacrifice it to him. When the bull appeared, it was such a perfect creature that Minos kept it, and offered a different sacrifice. In revenge, Poseidon made Minos’ wife Pasiphae fall in love with the bull. She had the builder Daedalus manufacture a hollow cow, which she hid inside so that the bull would copulate with her. The product of their tryst was the minotaur, a monster with the head and neck of a huge bull, and the body of a man. Minos had Daedalus build the labyrinth as a prison for the minotaur. He dared not offend Poseidon further by killing it. He fed it upon Athenian youths, collected in annual tribute, until Theseus, with the help of Minos’ daughter Ariadne, killed it.

N is for Nike. Nike is the Goddess of Victory – hence the adoption of the name by the sports company. She is very closely associated with the Goddess Athena, Goddess of Wisdom and Learning, and of War, and Athena was often depicted holding a much smaller Nike in her right hand. This was the case in the famous statue by Phidias, which was housed in the Parthenon.

O is for Oedipus. Oedipus is one of the most tragic figures in Greek Mythology. As a young man he was on his way to Thebes, and found a sphinx blocking the path onto a bridge over a ravine, forbidding passage to anyone who refused to answer its riddle. Those who did not provide the right answer would be cast to their deaths. Oedipus answered the riddle, and the sphinx had to cast itself to death in the ravine. Before he could enter the city he met an older man and they fell into a quarrel, in which the older man was killed. When he entered Thebes he found that the king, Laius had recently been killed. Fresh from his victory over the Sphinx, Oedipus was hailed as a hero. When he met the queen, Jocasta, they fell in love, married, and Oedipus became king. Years later, when they had had several children, the Blind Prophet Tiresias revealed that when Oedpius was born, it was prophesied that he would kill his father. As a result his parents, Laius and Jocasta, had sent him to be left on a mountainside by a shepherd to die. But the shepherd had raised him as his own. Jocasta committed suicide on hearing this, while Oedipus blinded himself and went into exile.

P is for Poseidon. Poseidon is one of the older brothers of Zeus, King of the Heavens. Poseidon, who helped defeat his father Cronus, became the God of the Sea. Normally depicted with a trident, Poseidon is also the God of Earthquakes. Although he fathered fewer of the great heroes than his brother Zeus, Poseidon was the father of one of the greatest of them all, Theseus. He is also the father of the cyclops Polyphemus, and Poseidon makes sure that Odysseus cannot return home for 10 years as revenge for the blinding of Polyphemus.

Q is for Queen Hippolyta. The Ninth Labour of Heracles was to fetch the belt, or girdle belonging to Hippolyta so that Eurystheus could give it to his daughter. Hippolyta was queen of the Amazons, a race of fierce warrior women. In most versions of the myth, Hippolyta falls in love with Heracles and gives him the girdle willingly. However, after this the enraged Hera, Queen of the Gods, spread a rumour that Heracles was going to abduct Hippolyta and they attacked. Some versions of the myth have Hippolyta killed here, some have him taking her captive, and eventually giving her to his friend Theseus, whom she eventually married. Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is set in Athens, in the run up to the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta.

R is for Rhodes. The Colossus of Rhodes was a huge, bronze, torch bearing statue standing by Mandraki Harbour on Rhodes, built by Chares of Lindos. It was one of the Ancient Seven Wonders of the World, and represented the sun god Helios. The Colossus was a direct inspiration for the Statue of Liberty, which also bears a crown of sun rays and a lit torch. Helios was often depicted as a young man driving the chariot of the sun across the sky. The statue only stood for about 54 years before being destroyed in an earthquake of 226 BC.

S is for Silenus. Silenus, often represented as a satyr, was a tutor and companion of Dionysus. He was seen as a minor deity of wine and drinking, representing the intoxicating effects of wine and alcohol. He is usually shown drunk and supported by either other satyrs or a donkey. When drunk – which was most of the time, Silenus was said to have the gift of prophecy. For entertaining Silenus with great kindness for five days, Dionysus granted King Midas his wish that everything he touched would turn to gold. Be careful what you wish for.

Greek Mythology A to Z

I belong to a Facebook group called "Sketching Every Day". As the name suggests, every day there is a prompt and members are invited to sketch something fitting the prompt. It isn't compulsory, and members can draw and post something completely different, or not post at all, as they wish. Every September members are invited to spend the first 26 days compiling an A to Z on a subject of their own choice. This September I have picked on a particular love of mine, (Classical) Greek Mythology. Here's the first few days so far. 

Achilles was the last, and one of the greatest Greek heroes. A central figure in the Trojan War, Achilles' is to my mind a tragic story about the futility of trying to avoid Fate. It illustrates how even the mightiest warrior can be defeated by small things. In essence, we each one of us have our own Achilles' heel

B is for Bellerophon. Here we have a hero brought low by his own hubris. Having shown great heroism in riding the winged horse Pegasus to defeat the monstrous Chimaera in his youth with the aid of the Goddess Athena, Bellerophon grew arrogant as he grew older. In his pride he decided that he had earned the honour of flying to Olympus on the back of Pegasus, and when attempted to do so,  Zeus sent a gadfly to sting Pegasus’ who bucked Bellerophon off. In one version of the myth Bellerophon fell into a thorn bush and was blinded, living out the rest of his days in misery and anguish.

C is for Chiron and also for Centaur. The most renowned of the centaurs, Chiron was wise and gentle, and in different myths served as tutor to some of the greatest heroes – Perseus, Theseus, Achilles, and in some sources, even Heracles, the greatest of them all. On his death, Zeus took his body and placed it amongst the stars as the constellation, Centaurus.

D is for Dionysus. Dionysus was a fertility god, especially associated with wine and celebration. His name literally translates as ‘twice born’. His mother, Semele, was lover to Zeus, whose wife Hera, Queen of the Gods, tricked her into asking Zeus for a gift. When he promised her to give her what she asked, she asked him to appear to her in his full God Like form. When he appeared to her so, the sight was too much for a human to bear, and she turned into a pile of dust. Zeus snatched the unborn infant Dionysus and stitched him into his own thigh, until it was time for his real birth.

E is for Erymanthian Boar. The hero Heracles was told by the Gods to fulfill 12 tasks for his cousin Eurystheus as a penance. As his 4^th task he was ordered to bring back the Erymanthian Boar, a fearsome wild beat of vast size and ravenous jaws. He drove it into a snowy wilderness, bound its feet, and carried it back to Eurystheus. Eurystheus himself was so frightened of the creature that he hid in a bronze jar until it was gone.