Stories

The myths themselves. Each account names the figures involved, the sources it comes from, and the places where the ancient traditions disagree with each other.

38 stories published

Aeneas and Turnus

war
Aeneas and Turnus fight the war in Latium that Virgil tells in Aeneid 7 to 12. Juno sends the Fury Allecto to break the peace between the Trojans and the Latins, and Turnus leads the Rutulians against Aeneas. The war ends in single combat, when Aeneas sees the baldric of the dead Pallas on Turnus's shoulder and kills him. Livy tells the war differently.
Arachne and Athena

hubris
Arachne was a mortal weaver of Lydia who would not admit that Athena had taught her, and who challenged the goddess to a contest. In Ovid's telling, Athena wove a warning about presumption while Arachne wove the gods' seductions, and Athena could find no flaw in her rival's work. Enraged, Athena tore the tapestry, struck Arachne, and after Arachne tried to hang herself, turned her into the first spider.
Atalanta and the Race

the footrace
Atalanta and the race is the myth of a huntress who would marry only the man who outran her, and who killed the men she caught. One suitor won with three golden apples from Aphrodite, which he dropped so she would stop to pick them up. Ovid names him Hippomenes and Apollodorus names him Melanion. Both end with the couple turned into lions.
Bellerophon and Pegasus

hubris
Bellerophon and Pegasus is the story of an exiled hero sent to Lycia to be killed, who instead slays the Chimera. In Pindar he first tames the winged horse with a golden bridle from Athena, then is thrown when he tries to ride to the gods. Homer tells the Lycian part with no horse at all.
Cadmus and the Dragon

city founding
Cadmus and the dragon is the founding story of Thebes. Following a cow to the place where she lay down, Cadmus sent his companions to a spring sacred to Ares, where a dragon killed them. He killed it, sowed its teeth on Athena's advice, and armed men rose from the earth and fought one another. Five survived, and Cadmus later served Ares for the killing.
Circe and the Swine

transformation
Odysseus's men became swine on the island of Aeaea because Circe drugged their food and struck them with a wand. Homer gives her no motive. The god Hermes gave Odysseus an herb, moly, that made him immune. He forced Circe to swear an oath and restore his crew, and they stayed with her for a year.
Creation from Chaos

creation
In Hesiod's Theogony the Greek world is not made by one god. It grows by births: Chaos comes first, then Earth, Tartarus and Eros, then Night and Darkness. Earth bears Sky, the hills and the sea, and the first divine generation ends when Kronos wounds Sky and Aphrodite rises from the foam. Zeus is born long after.
Daedalus and the Labyrinth

craftsmanship
Daedalus's years on Crete run from exile to a manhunt. Banished from Athens for killing his nephew, he built the wooden cow, then the Labyrinth for the Minotaur. He gave Ariadne the thread, and Minos jailed him for it. After his flight, Minos chased him to Sicily with a spiral shell and died at the court of Cocalus.
Deucalion and the Flood

flood
Deucalion and Pyrrha are the human survivors of Zeus's flood in Greek myth. In Apollodorus, Prometheus tells his son to build a chest, and the couple drift nine days to Parnassus. In Ovid, Jupiter drowns the world after Lycaon's crime, and Themis tells them to cast the bones of their great mother behind them. The stones become people.
Eros and Psyche

forbidden knowledge
Eros and Psyche survives only inside Apuleius's Latin novel The Golden Ass, told there as a story-within-a-story. A mortal princess so beautiful people worship her over Aphrodite marries an unseen husband on the condition she never look at him; when she breaks the condition with a lamp, she loses him and must complete four impossible tasks set by his furious mother before the couple can be reunited and Psyche made a goddess herself.
House of Atreus

curse
The House of Atreus is the royal family of Mycenae whose members kill one another across five generations, from Tantalus to Orestes. The sources trace the curse to a chariot race won by treachery, a golden lamb and a banquet of children. In Aeschylus it ends only when Athena and an Athenian jury acquit Orestes of killing his mother.
Iphigenia in Aulis

sacrifice
Iphigenia in Aulis is the episode in which the Greek fleet, held in port by contrary winds, is told it cannot sail for Troy until Agamemnon offers his daughter to Artemis. He lures her to the camp with a false wedding to Achilles. Euripides has her accept the altar, and his ending replaces her with a deer.
Jason and the Golden Fleece

quest
To reclaim the throne his uncle Pelias had stolen, Jason assembled the greatest heroes of Greece into a crew called the Argonauts and sailed the ship Argo to the distant land of Colchis to retrieve the Golden Fleece, succeeding only with the help of the Colchian sorceress Medea.
Midas and the Golden Touch

greed
The golden touch is the gift Dionysus gives King Midas of Phrygia in Ovid's Metamorphoses, after Midas returns the captured Silenus: whatever he touches turns to gold. It ruins his meals, and Dionysus tells him to wash in the source of the river Pactolus, which takes the gift away. The tale of Midas turning his daughter to gold is not ancient. It comes from Nathaniel Hawthorne, in 1851.
Narcissus and Echo

unrequited love
Narcissus and Echo is Ovid's story of two failed loves punished the same way. Echo, a nymph cursed to only repeat the last words spoken to her, falls for the beautiful Narcissus and wastes away to a voice alone when he rejects her. Narcissus is punished in turn: he falls in love with his own reflection in a pool, unable to possess what he sees, and wastes away until a flower is found where his body lay.
Odysseus and the Cyclops

cunning
On his long voyage home from Troy, Odysseus and his men were trapped in the cave of Polyphemus, a man-eating Cyclops and son of Poseidon. Through cunning and deception Odysseus blinded the giant and escaped, but a reckless boast of his own name earned him the lasting wrath of Poseidon.
Odysseus and the Sirens

temptation
Odysseus beat the Sirens by following Circe's plan: his crew plugged their ears with wax and tied him upright to the mast, so he heard the song and could not steer toward it. Homer's Sirens offer knowledge of Troy and of everything on earth. Apollodorus says they died once a ship passed, and Apollonius has Orpheus outsing them.
Oedipus and the Sphinx

riddles
A winged monster sat above Thebes and devoured the Thebans who could not answer her riddle. Creon, ruling after Laius's death, promised the kingdom and Laius's widow to whoever solved it. Oedipus, newly arrived from Corinth, answered that the riddle meant man. The Sphinx threw herself from the citadel, and Oedipus married the queen, who was his own mother.
Orpheus in the Underworld

love
The legendary musician Orpheus descended to the underworld to retrieve his dead wife Eurydice. His music moved even the gods of death, but he lost her forever when he broke the one condition of her release - by looking back.
Perseus and Medusa

heroism
King Polydectes sent Perseus after Medusa's head expecting him to die in the attempt. Armed with gifts from three different gods, Perseus beheaded the sleeping Gorgon by her mirrored reflection, then used the head itself as a weapon on his way home.
Prometheus and the Gift of Fire

defiance
The Titan Prometheus defied Zeus by stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humanity, granting them the means to build civilization. Zeus punished him with eternal torment, chaining him to a rock where an eagle devoured his liver each day.
Scylla and Charybdis

the sea voyage home
Scylla and Charybdis are the two sea monsters on either side of a narrow strait that Odysseus must pass after the Sirens. Circe tells him to steer close to six-headed Scylla and lose six men rather than risk the whole ship in Charybdis's whirlpool. He follows the advice, and Scylla takes six of his best men from the deck.
Seven Against Thebes

war
The Seven Against Thebes is the failed war that seven champions from Argos fought to put Polynices, son of Oedipus, on the Theban throne after his brother Eteocles refused to share it. Every champion except the Argive king Adrastus died, and the two brothers killed each other in single combat, fulfilling the curse their father had laid on them.
Sisyphus and the Boulder

cunning
Sisyphus pushes a boulder uphill in Hades, and it rolls back each time, as Odysseus sees in Homer's Odyssey. Apollodorus and Pausanias say the punishment follows his telling the river god Asopus that Zeus had carried off Aegina. Later scholia add that he chained Death, and Theognis says he talked Persephone into letting him return from Hades.
The Abduction of Europa

abduction
The Abduction of Europa tells how Zeus, disguised as a tame white bull, wins the trust of the Phoenician princess Europa on a beach and carries her out to sea to Crete. There he reveals himself, and their union produces Minos, Rhadamanthys and, in later tradition, Sarpedon - Minos above all shaping Crete's own legendary kingship and law.
The Abduction of Persephone

seasons
Hades carried Persephone into the underworld with the prior consent of Zeus, her father. Her mother Demeter withheld all growth from the earth until the girl was returned, but Persephone had eaten a pomegranate seed below and so was bound to spend part of every year there, which the Homeric Hymn to Demeter gives as the origin of the seasons.
The Birth of Athena

origin myths
Warned by Gaia and Ouranos that a son of Metis would overthrow him, Zeus swallowed his pregnant first wife whole. When the child was due, his skull was split open with an axe, and Athena sprang out fully grown, already armed, and shouting a war cry.
The Death of Achilles

fate and prophecy
The death of Achilles happens after Homer's Iliad ends, with Hector's funeral. Later sources say Paris shot him in the ankle at the Scaean gate while Apollo guided the arrow. Ajax carried out his body, Thetis, the Nereids and the Muses mourned him, and the arms went to Odysseus. The heel is a still later detail.
The Fall of Icarus

hubris
To escape imprisonment on Crete, the craftsman Daedalus built wings of feathers and wax for himself and his son Icarus. Ignoring his father's warning, Icarus flew too close to the sun, the wax melted, and he fell to his death in the sea.
The Fall of Troy

war
Troy falls in a single night. The Greeks hide armed men in a wooden horse, sail out of sight to Tenedos, and leave the Trojans to drag the horse inside their own walls. The hidden men climb out in the dark and open the gates to the returning fleet. The Iliad ends before this, so the account rests on the Odyssey, Virgil, Apollodorus and Quintus Smyrnaeus.
The Founding of Rome

founding
The founding of Rome is the story of how Romulus and Remus, after restoring their grandfather Numitor to the throne of Alba, set out to found a city where they had been exposed. They asked the birds who should rule it: Remus saw six vultures, Romulus twelve. Romulus ploughed the boundary, Remus died at the wall, and the city took Romulus's name. The ancient writers disagree over who struck Remus.
The Gigantomachy

war
The Gigantomachy is the war in which the Olympian gods fought the Giants, the earth-born sons of Gaia, after the Titans had fallen. An oracle said the gods could not kill the Giants without a mortal's help, so Zeus called on Heracles. Each god slew a named Giant, and the Giants lost. It is a separate war from the Titanomachy.
The Judgement of Paris

fate
The Judgement of Paris is the divine beauty contest that gives the Trojan War its mythic cause. At the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, three goddesses bribe the Trojan prince Paris for a golden apple marked "for the fairest," and his choice of Aphrodite's reward, Helen, sets the whole war in motion.
The Rape of the Sabine Women

abduction
The rape of the Sabine women is the Roman legend of how a city without wives seized young women at a festival. “Rape” translates Latin raptus, “carrying off”. Livy, Plutarch and Dionysius describe a mass abduction for marriage, then wars with four neighbouring peoples, ended when the women stepped between their fathers and husbands. Romans and Sabines then shared one city and one kingship.
The Titanomachy

succession
The Titanomachy is the ten-year war between Kronos's Titans and Zeus's Olympians for control of the cosmos. Neither side could force a result until Zeus freed the Cyclopes and Hundred-Handers, imprisoned since Ouranos's own reign, from Tartarus. Their thunderbolts and hurled rocks broke the stalemate, and most Titans were bound in Tartarus in turn.
The Trojan War

war
The Trojan War is the legendary ten-year siege of Troy fought by a coalition of Greek kings under Agamemnon, sparked by the Trojan prince Paris taking Helen from her husband Menelaus. Homer's Iliad, the fullest surviving account, actually narrates only a few weeks near the war's tenth year: the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, Patroclus's death, and Hector's death.
The Twelve Labors of Heracles

heroism
Driven mad by Hera and having killed his own wife and children, Heracles consulted the Oracle at Delphi and was commanded to serve King Eurystheus and complete twelve seemingly impossible labors as penance, feats that took him across the known world and down into the underworld itself.
Theseus and the Minotaur

heroism
The Athenian hero Theseus volunteered as tribute to Crete, entered the inescapable Labyrinth, slew the Minotaur, and found his way out using a thread given to him by the Cretan princess Ariadne - a rescue that ended in her abandonment and his father's death.