Glossary
The recurring vocabulary of myth: concepts, places, and objects that appear across many stories. Each term is defined once and linked to everywhere it turns up.
72 terms published
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Acheron
Acheron is one of the rivers of the Greek Underworld, named among the waterways a soul must cross to reach the realm of the dead.
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Aegis
The aegis is a divine defensive device carried by Zeus and Athena in Greek mythology, most often described as a tasseled goat-skin shield or breastplate edged with serpents and capable of spreading terror across a battlefield.
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Ambrosia and Nectar
Ambrosia and nectar are the substances that sustain the Olympian gods in Greek mythology and mark the boundary between divine and mortal bodies.
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Apotheosis
Apotheosis is the process by which a mortal is transformed into a god, the rare exception to the sharp line Greek and Roman myth otherwise draws between the two categories of being.
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Argonauts
The Argonauts are the crew of heroes who sail with Jason aboard the ship Argo to retrieve the Golden Fleece from Colchis, one of Greek myth's largest single gatherings of named heroes in one story.
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Bident
A bident is a two-pronged, fork-like implement popularly assigned to Hades, the Greek god of the underworld, and his Roman counterpart Pluto, chiefly as a visual counterpart to Poseidon's three-pronged trident.
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Bow and Arrow
The bow and arrow is the shared weapon of the twin archer gods Apollo and Artemis in Greek mythology, and separately, in an entirely distinct tradition, of Eros and his Roman counterpart Cupid - three different gods carrying the same kind of weapon toward three different ends.
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Caduceus
The caduceus is the herald's staff carried by Hermes in Greek mythology and by his Roman counterpart Mercury, shown in later art with two serpents entwined around a winged shaft.
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Cassandra
Cassandra is the prophetess of Troy who sees the truth and is believed by no one.
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Catabasis
Catabasis is the literary motif of a living person descending into the underworld and, in the success cases, returning from it.
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Centaurs
Centaurs are a race of hybrid beings in Greek mythology, human in the upper body and horse from the waist down, most often depicted as a lawless people prone to drunkenness and violence rather than as individuals with myths of their own.
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Chthonic
Chthonic describes gods, spirits, and powers belonging to the earth and the world beneath it, as opposed to the Olympian gods of the sky and the mountain-top.
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Cocytus
Cocytus, the River of Wailing, is one of the rivers of the Greek Underworld, its name built from the Greek verb for lamenting or wailing aloud.
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Cornucopia
The cornucopia, or horn of plenty, is a curved animal horn overflowing with fruit, grain, and flowers that stands in Greek and Roman mythology for endless abundance, most often shown in the hands of harvest and fortune figures such as Demeter, her Roman counterpart Ceres, and the personified goddess of abundance, Copia.
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Cyclopes
The Cyclopes are one-eyed giants in Greek mythology, but the name actually covers two distinct and unrelated traditions that most readers blend together without realizing they come from different sources.
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Cypress Tree
The cypress tree is the Greek and Roman symbol of mourning, death, and the underworld, an association traced in myth to Cyparissus, a young companion of Apollo who was transformed into the tree after accidentally killing a pet stag he loved.
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Delphi
Delphi is the sanctuary of Apollo on the southern slope of Mount Parnassus, home to the most consulted oracle in the ancient Greek world and a site whose religious authority reached across the whole Greek-speaking world rather than any single city-state.
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Demigod
A demigod in Greek mythology is a being born of one divine and one mortal parent, possessing abilities beyond ordinary humans while still being subject to death.
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Dove
The dove is the bird most closely associated with Aphrodite, goddess of love, and her Roman counterpart Venus, appearing in ancient art and poetry as a symbol of desire, gentleness, and peace rather than of war or hunting the way other gods' birds often are.
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Elysium
Elysium, also called the Elysian Fields or the Elysian Plain, is the blessed afterlife reserved in Greek mythology for a select few favored by the gods, rather than the common destination of the dead.
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Empusa
Empusa is a shape-shifting female monster or spirit in Greek folklore, associated with Hecate, goddess of crossroads, night, and magic, and typically described as able to change her form at will and to appear with one leg of bronze and one of donkey dung.
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Epithet
An epithet is a fixed descriptive title attached to a god's or hero's name, and the word covers two genuinely different things that get blurred together in casual use.
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Golden Age
The Golden Age is the first and best of the five successive human races Hesiod describes in Works and Days, a generation of mortals who lived under Cronus's rule on Olympus before the current, harshest age began.
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Golden Fleece
The Golden Fleece is the wool of a divine, flying, golden-haired ram in Greek mythology, and the object of the Argonauts' quest under Jason.
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Graeae
The Graeae, also called the Phorcides after their father Phorcys, are ancient sister-spirits, gray-haired from birth, who share a single eye and a single tooth between them, passing the pair from one sister to another in turn.
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Griffin
A griffin (Greek gryps) is a mythological creature with the head, wings, and talons of an eagle joined to the body of a lion, treated in surviving Greek literature less as a monster with its own myth than as a geographical detail placed at the edge of the known world.
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Harpies
The Harpies are bird-women in Greek mythology whose name means "snatchers," reflecting their defining trait: they seize things, and sometimes people, and carry them away without warning.
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Hecatomb
A hecatomb is a large-scale animal sacrifice offered to a god, literally "a hundred oxen" in origin, though Greek usage did not require a literal count of one hundred so much as a sacrifice on that grand a scale, offered by a whole community rather than a single household.
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Hubris
Hubris is excessive pride or self-assertion in Greek thought, most dangerously when a mortal treats themselves as the equal of, or superior to, a god.
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Kleos
Kleos is the Greek word for the glory or renown a hero wins through great deeds, especially deeds remembered and retold by others after the hero is gone.
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Labrys
The labrys is a double-headed axe, with a blade on each side of the haft, best known today as a symbol of Minoan Bronze Age Crete and, through a much later and more speculative etymology, as the object some scholars believe gave the Labyrinth its name.
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Laurel Wreath
The laurel wreath, woven from the leaves of the bay laurel tree, is the plant emblem of Apollo in Greek and Roman mythology and, through him, the standard crown for victors - first at the games held in his honor, and later for poets, generals, and emperors far beyond the mythological context that first attached the plant to him.
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Lethe
Lethe is Greek for "forgetfulness," and the word names two related but distinct things in the ancient sources: a primordial personification in the earliest genealogical tradition, and a river of the underworld in the later tradition that became far more famous.
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Lion Skin and Club
Heracles's lion skin and club are his two most consistent visual attributes across Greek art and literature, together identifying him more reliably than any other detail: the skin of the Nemean Lion worn as a cloak or crude armor, with the animal's head pulled over his own like a helmet, and a heavy, knotted club, usually shown as an uprooted tree still rough with bark rather than a finished weapon.
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Lyre
The lyre is a stringed instrument invented by Hermes and given to Apollo, becoming so closely tied to Apollo afterward that it stands as his defining attribute across Greek art and poetry, and is separately the instrument that makes Orpheus the most famous musician in the mythological tradition.
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Maenads
Maenads are the frenzied female followers of Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstatic ritual, and their name comes from the Greek mainesthai, "to rage" or "to be mad." Ancient sources present them less as a fixed race of beings, the way the Centaurs or the Gorgons are, and more as a state Dionysus induces in ordinary women, mortal or divine, who come under his influence.
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Mount Olympus
Mount Olympus is the highest mountain in Greece, rising on the border between Thessaly and Macedonia, and the mythological home of the Olympian gods, whose name derives from it.
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Nemesis (Concept)
In modern English, a "nemesis" is an archrival or an inescapable downfall, the person or force that finally brings someone low after a run of unearned success.
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Nereids
The Nereids are the fifty sea-nymph daughters of the old sea-god Nereus and the Oceanid Doris, listed by name in a long catalogue near the start of Hesiod's Theogony.
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Nostos
Nostos is Greek for "homecoming" or "return," and in the study of Greek epic it names both a specific idea and a whole lost genre.
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Nymph
Nymphs are the minor female nature spirits of Greek mythology, tied to a particular place or natural feature rather than to a domain the way an Olympian god is.
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Olympian
The Olympians are the principal gods of the Greek pantheon, named for their home on Mount Olympus.
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Omphalos
The omphalos, Greek for "navel," is the stone kept inside Apollo's temple at Delphi that the Delphians held to mark the exact center of the earth.
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Oracle
An oracle in Greek mythology is both a sacred site where a god communicates with mortals through prophecy and the prophecy delivered there.
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Owl
The owl, specifically the small species known today as the little owl (Athene noctua), is the sacred bird of Athena in Greek mythology and, by extension, of her Roman counterpart Minerva, so closely tied to the goddess that ancient Athenians used it as shorthand for her presence.
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Panhellenic Games
The Panhellenic Games were the four great athletic festivals open to competitors from every Greek city rather than to the citizens of any one polis: the Olympic Games at Olympia, sacred to Zeus; the Pythian Games at Delphi, sacred to Apollo; the Isthmian Games at Corinth; and the Nemean Games at Nemea.
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Pantheon
Pantheon, from the Greek for "all the gods," names the full population of Greek divinity across every generation that ever held power, not one fixed list drawn from whichever generation currently rules.
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Peacock
The peacock is the sacred bird of Hera, queen of the gods, and of her Roman counterpart Juno, an association myth explains through the eye-like markings on its tail: Hera is said to have placed the hundred eyes of Argus Panoptes, a giant who died guarding a rival on her orders, into the feathers of her favorite bird after his death.
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Phlegethon
Phlegethon, also named Pyriphlegethon, is the river of fire among the five rivers of the Greek underworld, the one specific attribute that sets it apart from Styx, Acheron, Cocytus, and Lethe: where the others are defined by an oath, a grief, a wail, or a forgetting, Phlegethon burns.
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Phoenix
The phoenix is a mythical bird said to live for centuries, die by fire, and be reborn from its own remains - but despite its enormous later fame, it is a marginal, late-arriving figure in the actual Greek and Roman mythological tradition rather than a fixture of early epic.
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Pomegranate
The pomegranate is the fruit that binds Persephone to the underworld in Greek myth, eaten during her captivity under Hades and cited by ancient versions of the story as the reason she cannot return permanently to her mother Demeter and the world above.
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Prytaneion
The prytaneion was a Greek city's civic hearth-hall, the building holding the community's own perpetual fire, sacred to Hestia, and the seat from which a polis's shared public life was administered.
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Psychopomp
A psychopomp, from Greek words for "soul" and "guide" or "conductor," is a figure whose role is to lead the souls of the dead from the world of the living toward the afterlife, rather than to judge them, punish them, or rule over where they end up.
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Pythia
The Pythia is the title of the priestess who spoke Apollo's oracles at Delphi, not the name of a single individual.
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River Styx
The River Styx is the principal river of the Greek Underworld, forming the boundary between the world of the living and the realm of the dead.
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Satyrs
Satyrs are minor woodland spirits in Greek mythology, human in shape except for a tail and, in the more familiar later Greek and Roman image, goat legs and small horns as well.
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Scallop Shell
The scallop shell is the object most associated in visual art with Aphrodite's, and her Roman counterpart Venus's, birth from the sea, though the shell itself is largely absent from the earliest and most authoritative ancient literary account of that birth.
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Silenus
Silenus is the aged companion and former tutor of Dionysus, usually shown drunk, riding or clinging to a donkey, and unable to stay upright without help.
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Sirens
The Sirens are dangerous creatures in Greek mythology whose irresistible singing lures sailors to their deaths on the rocks of their island, most famously survived by Odysseus, who has his crew bind him to the mast so he can hear the song without steering the ship toward it.
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Tartarus
Tartarus is the deepest region of the Underworld in Greek mythology, a dark abyss used as a dungeon for the wicked and a prison for the defeated Titans.
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The Furies (Erinyes)
The Furies, known in Greek as the Erinyes, are ancient chthonic goddesses of vengeance who pursue and punish the guilty, especially those who kill their own kin, break solemn oaths, or violate the natural bonds owed to family.
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The Gorgons
The Gorgons are three monstrous sisters in Greek mythology - Stheno, Euryale, and Medusa - whose direct gaze turns anyone who meets it to stone.
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The Labyrinth
The Labyrinth is the vast, inescapable maze built beneath the palace of Knossos on Crete, designed by the craftsman Daedalus at the command of King Minos to hold the Minotaur, a creature with a bull's head on a man's body.
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The Moirai (Fates)
The Moirai, commonly known as the Fates, are three goddesses who control the destiny of every mortal and god in Greek mythology.
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The Underworld
The Underworld is the realm of the dead in Greek mythology, ruled by Hades and his queen Persephone.
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Theogony
Theogony, Greek for "the birth of the gods," is both a general word for an account of how the gods came to exist and the specific title of Hesiod's poem, the only complete Greek theogony to survive from antiquity.
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Thunderbolt
The thunderbolt is Zeus's signature weapon in Greek mythology, a bolt of divine fire he hurls to shatter enemies, punish oath-breakers, and strike down mortals who overreach; the Romans give the same weapon to Jupiter, where it is called the fulmen.
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Thyrsus
The thyrsus is the staff carried by Dionysus and, under his Roman name, Bacchus, along with his followers - a stalk of giant fennel tipped with a bunch of ivy leaves or a pine cone, and one of the clearest visual markers of Dionysiac worship in ancient art and literature.
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Titan
The Titans are a race of powerful primordial deities who ruled the cosmos during the Golden Age, before being overthrown by the Olympian gods.
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Trident
The trident is the three-pronged spear carried by Poseidon in Greek mythology and by his Roman counterpart Neptune, a weapon and scepter that marks its holder as ruler of the sea and master of earthquakes.
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Trojan Horse
The Trojan Horse is the hollow wooden statue the Greeks used to smuggle armed men inside the walls of Troy after ten years of failing to take the city by direct siege.
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Winged Sandals
Winged sandals are the flight-giving footwear of Hermes, the messenger god, and by extension of his Roman counterpart Mercury - golden sandals fitted with small wings at the ankle that let their wearer travel over land and sea at the speed of thought.