It's believed that it's entirely possible that there were more children attributed to Hades and Persephone that were later syncretised to become children of Zeus. In the story of Zagreus, its mentioned that the father appeared as a snake A creature associated with Hades and the Underworld , the father is written into this myth in code, not outright, as Hades.
A few lines are added to reference back to Zeus, but the deeper symbolism points to Hades. The way that this myth was written was done in a way so that people who worshipped her as a child of Hades were free to do so; but also those who believed that she was a child of Zeus had a way of explaining their beliefs. Another myth tells of Hades' involvement with Asclepius, a mortal son of Apollo who was a gifted healer and the world's first doctor.
Asclepius was so gifted he was able to give mortals longer lives by curing plagues and showing them how to take care of themselves.
Asclepius brought people back from the brink of death many times. Eventually though Asclepius started to bring people back from the dead for hefty sums of money. It was with this feat that Hades lost his temper and stormed up to Mount Olympus demanding that Asclepius pay the price for openly mocking death. Zeus appeased Hades by personally striking down Asclepius with a thunderbolt.
Apollo, enraged at the death of his son, killed the younger generations of Cyclopes that forged the bolt. Enraged at Apollo's defiance Zeus forced him to serve a mortal king for a year as punishment. Asclepius was later deified as the god of healing. One of the few other myths Hades played a major part in was the myth of Sisyphus.
Sisyphus was a clever and charismatic king who feared death and made up his mind to find a way to evade Hades. Sisyphus trapped Thanatos when he came to reap his soul and though Thanatos escaped and Hades would drag Sisyphus to the Underworld anyway Sisyphus had told his wife not to bury him with fare and so his ghost was sent back to ask for his last rites but Sisyphus instead remained in the world of the living as an undead, content to live forever in life rather than go to the Underworld.
However, Hades discovered Sisyphus' ruse and came to collect him. Hades was so angry at Sisyphus for holding the natural order hostage that he arranged a special punishment for him. Hades put Sisyphus on the edge the pits of Tartarus but told Sisyphus that his schemes would be overlooked and he had a chance to go to the paradise of Elysium if and only if he could roll a large boulder up a hill; Sisyphus quickly agreed fearing the punishments of Tartarus and tried to push the boulder up the hill but it fell, frantically he tried again and it fell.
Sisyphus would keep trying to push the boulder up the hill so he would never be brought to be punished in the fiery pits and one day he could get out and go to Elysium, but Hades never told him the boulder, like all parts of the Underworld, obeyed his wishes and would always roll down and that that was his punishment.
So Sisyphus continues to try to escape Tartarus forever punished by his own ambitions. Hades was also featured in the myth of Heracles. When Heracles raided Pylos, Hades was presen, fighting alongside the people of Pylos. Heracles shot Hades in the heel with one of his hydra blood arrows. This caused Hades to ascend Olympus in order to be healed by the immortal healer, Paean.
According to Ovid, Hades was pursued by the nymph Minthe, associated with the river Cocytus, however, Persephone turned Minthe into the plant called mint by trampling her into the ground.
In Ancient times the bird was seen as an omen of bad luck and also had a mythical association with death. Greek Mythology Wiki Explore. Bureaucrats Messenger of Heaven.
Register Don't have an account? View source. History Talk 0. We've moved! In Greek mythology, Hades was the god of the underworld, the kingdom of the dead. The Romans called him Pluto. Although the name Hades is often used to indicate the underworld itself, it rightfully belongs only to the god, whose kingdom was known as the land of Hades or house of Hades. When Hades was born, Cronus swallowed him as he had swallowed his other children at birth. However, Zeus escaped this fate, and he tricked Cronus into taking a potion that made him vomit up Hades and his siblings.
Together these gods and goddesses rebelled against the Titans and seized power from them. After gaining control of the universe, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus drew lots to divide it among themselves. Zeus gained control of the sky, Poseidon took the sea, and Hades received the underworld. The Underworld Kingdom. The kingdom of the dead was divided into two regions. At the very bottom lay Tartarus, a land of terrible blackness where the wicked suffered eternal torments.
Among those imprisoned there were the Titans, who were guarded by giants with a hundred arms. Meaning in Greek "the Unseen One," Hades isn't so much a name as a description. This euphemism—that is, a nice way of saying a bad thing—betrays a certain superstitious reluctance on the part of the Greeks to refer to this god by his actual name, whatever that was, since to call him by name was to invoke him and thereby death. In that vein, the Greeks also called him Pluto from their word ploutos "wealth" because they credited him in part with the fertility of crops, the richness of the earth and its mineral resources, especially gold.
Demeter is the goddess of grain and agriculture, whose name is sometimes rendered in Greek Da-meter meaning "Earth-mother. Demeter was important enough in this native culture to have been absorbed by the invading Greeks and included among the principal Olympians. In support of this hypothesis, most of her myths have a primitive aura about them and she's largely absent from later legends and myth. The great exception to that is the Eleusinian Mysteries , an influential cult which survived well into Roman times and in which Demeter played a central role.
Because it was a mystery cult whose devotees were sworn to secrecy, we today don't know exactly what the Eleusinian Mysteries entailed, but there can be little doubt they revolved around the most important myth in the Demeter cycle, the rape of Persephone see above, Hades. Aphrodite is the goddess of sexual love and beauty.
According to one story she was born as a result of Cronus' revolt against his father Uranus. After Cronus castrated Uranus and flung his genitals into the ocean, Aphrodite arose from the foam of the sea that formed around Uranus' dismembered organs, a story stimulated, no doubt, by the interpretation of her name as "foam aphro - born - dite ," a dubious etymology. The goddess floated to shore on a shell, inspiring among other things one of the Renaissance painter Botticelli's most famous paintings.
A tamer version of her birth co-exists alongside this in Greek myth, that she was the child of Zeus and Dione, not Hera but a demi-goddess of that name. Although she was technically wed to the ugly Hephaestus, Aphrodite had liaisons with quite a few gods and mortals and is the only one of the Olympian goddesses outside of Demeter to have children by mortals, e.
As such, she was a popular goddess and appears in many Greek myths. In some she assists young lovers, but more often she's depicted as vengeful and angry, chastising those who defy or deny her. Her punishments are often highly creative and unusual. For instance, the women of the island Lemnos ignored her, and so she made them all smell so bad that their husbands divorced them and imported new foreign wives. Out of madness and frustration the Lemnian women killed all the men on their island, hardly a well thought-out solution to the problem.
The women were then left alone and lonely on their island until the Argonauts happened by and solved their problem, incidentally repopulating the island at the same time. Despite her eternal youth and beauty, Aphrodite was a very ancient goddess, perhaps borrowed by the Greeks from their eastern neighbors. Originally a mother-goddess, a type worshiped widely throughout the ancient Near East, Aphrodite bears close resemblance in many ways to the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar or the Canaanite Ashtoreth Astarte.
For example, Aphrodite's priestesses in several Greek towns were prostitutes just as Ishtar's. According to Herodotus, the worship of Mylitta, Aphrodite's equivalent in Babylon, required that women offer themselves at least once during their lives in the goddess' temple to strange men for any price.
This, Herodotus notes with a smirk, posed a problem for ugly women who might have to remain in the temple for many years awaiting an offer. In general, Aphrodite is treated rather lightly by the Greeks, especially Homer who makes her subordinate to Hera and Athena. A famous exception is Euripides' portrait of the goddess in his tragic masterpiece Hippolytus , where she emerges as all-powerful and highly dangerous. Also, the Romans who called her Venus worshiped her with great solemnity.
The god of fire and the forge, Hephaestus is one of the few legitimate children of Zeus and Hera. According to a different story, Hera grew angry at Zeus' perpetual infidelity and gave birth to Hephaestus parthenogenetically, that is, without her husband's involvement.
Either way Hephaestus was largely ignored by his father along with the majority of ancient poets and playwrights. Indeed, so preternaturally ugly and lame, the new-born baby Hephaestus was flung out of Olympus by his own mother disgusted at his deformity. He fell for many days, according to myth, finally landing on the island of Lemnos where there was a cult to him in antiquity. Hephaestus is associated with volcanic eruptions, often accredited to his working in a smithy deep below the earth.
He was best known for his many inventive creations, for instance, the shield of Achilles The Iliad , Book 18 , palaces for the gods and golden robots which speak and think and assisted him in his work at the forge.
Most myths concerning Hephaestus center around his wife Aphrodite. Having been awarded her as wife in order to prevent a violent quarrel among the other more powerful and handsome gods who wanted her, Hephaestus won last place in her heart, a sentiment she proved by having numerous affairs.
Homer, for instance, describes in The Odyssey Book 8 how Hephaestus thought he'd gotten revenge on her for her frequent infidelities. He trapped her and her current lover, Ares the god of war, in bed by dropping a mesh of chains on them as they were making love. The indignant cuckold then called the gods to the scene—the goddesses refused to come out of shame—to witness her adultery.
Some gods laughed, others expressed their disgust, but none refused to look at the naked Aphrodite and in the back Apollo whispered to Hermes, "Would you suffer these humiliating chains, if you could lie down with golden Aphrodite? Ares is the god of war and an exceptionally unpleasant character. In many stories he's little more than a bully and a butcher, loved only by Hades because he's the death-god's best wholesale supplier. Like Hephaestus, Ares is the son of Zeus and Hera and further evidence that his parents' marriage wasn't a very good match.
Moreover, for all his vainglorious boasting Ares isn't very successful in war. In mythological combat, he's defeated by his sister Athena, the hero Heracles four times! When he complains of his mistreatment to his father, Zeus calls him a two-faced brute, tells him to quit whining and says that his quarrelsome nature comes from his mother Hera, and that if he were not his son he would have kicked him out of Olympus long ago.
The Greeks' scorn of war comes through clearly in this depiction of Ares, and in the fact that archaeologists have found relatively few shrines to him in Greece. Most of his centers of worship were in northern Greece from which this deity may have been exported to the cities of the south. As a deity of war, Athena was far preferable to most Greeks, especially in Athens the city named after her.
Also a goddess of wisdom and crafts, her prominence is at least in part due to Athens' dominance of our historical and literary sources. Had we more records from ancient cities outside of Athens, we would, no doubt, see a more balanced picture of Athena. As it is, she comes across as a strong, virgin goddess, the protectress and patron of civilized man against errant barbarians. The personification of ingenuity and genius, she is attributed with inspiring such remarkable inventions as the Trojan horse, the double flute, the ship Argo, the magic bridle used to harness the flying horse Pegasus and the mirrored shield with which Perseus killed the Gorgon Medusa.
Her wisdom was, thus, rarely the abstract sort we tend to associate with philosophers and poets, more often the practical kind linked with cunning and technical expertise. Athena was born in a highly unusual manner. Her father Zeus ate her mother Metis "Wisdom" in fear that the pregnant Metis would give birth to a child who would be greater than he was.
Metis survived, however—she was clever, after all—living on in Zeus' head where eventually she went into labor causing Zeus to have a great headache.
Hephaestus—or in some stories the Titan Prometheus—split Zeus' skull open and out came the goddess Athena fully grown and armed. In art she can be identified by her crested helmet, spear and shield emblazoned with a Gorgon's head, a present from Perseus for her help in killing the Medusa. She's also often depicted with an owl, the bird that symbolized wisdom and her city Athens. Sometimes she's called Pallas Athena in memory of her childhood friend Pallas whom she killed accidently while playing war-games.
Apollo represents a wide amalgam of powers and attributes. He's the god of the sun, wisdom, prophesy, music, flocks, wolves, mice, entrances, plagues and medicine. How he came to be included in the Greek pantheon and was introduced to Greece is not at all clear, but some historical data suggest he may have been an eastern god originally—possibly Apulunas, a god of the Hittites who occupied central Asia Minor Turkey in the second millennium BCE—though the ancient Greeks linked him with the peoples of the far North.
Whatever the truth, it's evident from both the many spheres he controls and his other names, Loxias see below and Phoebus —sometimes combined with Apollo to make "Phoebus Apollo"—that he represents the conflation of several deities, native and foreign perhaps.
The story of his birth is one of the most famous myths in the Greek canon. His mother the Titaness Leto was impregnated by Zeus, extra-maritally as usual. When Hera discovered this, she became enraged and wished to prevent the birth of Leto's child—or children, as it turned out, since Leto had twins, Apollo and Artemis. As the name of the poem depicts Theogony means the birth of Gods , it deals with the creation of the human world and the ancient Gods.
The Greek mythology says that the Greek gods were living in Mount Olympus , the highest mountain in Greece. Like all gods, they were immortal. The imagination of the people would not picture them as eternally young, but each god had a different age. For example, Zeus and Hera were middle-aged, while Apollo and Aphrodite were forever young.
To keep their eternal life, the Olympian Gods would eat ambrosia and drink nectar. The Olympian Gods were 12 in number. However, in Greek mythology stories, there were also many other smaller gods and deities that lived in the earth. For example, nymphs of the sea lived in the waves and nymphs of the forest lived inside the boles of the trees. For the ancient Greeks , many natural phenomena or nature itself were also personalized as gods. Aether was the god of the upper air, Hemera was the goddess of daylight, Erebus the god of darkness and Zephyros the god of the west wind.
There were also special gods for feelings and situations, such as Themis for justice, Via for violence, Eris for discord, Hebe for youth, Hypnos for sleep, Mania for insanity and many others. The gods would usually mate with each other or with mortals and have children. For example, Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, and Ares, the god of war, gave birth to Cupid, the god of love.
Also, the coupling of Zeus and a mortal woman named Leto gave birth to two important gods, Apollo and Artemis. It was very frequent that the child of a god and a mortal was made god or at least had superficial powers. Let's take the example of Hercules , the son of Zeus and mortal Alcmena.
Although he was not considered a god, he had inherited some extra-human powers. He had great strength and could beat huge giants in battle.
Hercules is mostly known in mythology for his twelve labors, such as the slaying of the Nemean Lion and of the 9-headed Lernaean Hydra, the steal of the Esperides Apples and the Capture of Cerberus.
Another hero with superficial powers was Theseus , the son of mortal Aethra and the divine Poseidon. He is famous as a king of Athens and also for his difficult tasks: to kill the Minotaur and to win the legendary Amazons during their siege of Athens. Gods, for the ancient Greeks, had a very liberal attitude in life. Family unions were not applicable to them, that is why brothers could marry their sisters and have children or a son could kill his parents. How much liberal rules were for the gods, this would not apply for mortals.
If a mortal broke up a moral rule, the punishment was severe. Particularly strong for the mortals was the anti-blasphemy rule, which banned people from talking unrespectfully against a god. If someone did so, the god would get angry and punish him. In general, the ancient Greeks would consider something bad in their lives as punishment for gods.
If they had a disease, they would pray to the gods to forgive his sins. If a flood would occur and destroy their city, they would make a sacrifice to calm down the gods.
From this, it can be seen that there was a sense of respect and fear between people and the gods and that people didn't feel free to live their lives, but thought that everything would come or be taken away from them. Hesiod depicted the universe as a chaotic place until the emergence of the divine beings Eros Love , Abyss Tartarus and Erebus Darkness.
After them, Gaia Earth was born who gave birth to Uranus the Sky. They also gave birth to the three Cyclopes Arges thunderbolt , Steropes lightning , and Brontes thunder and the three Hecatoncheires. Hecatoncheires were massive creatures with 50 heads and arms of great strength. Cronus, a second generation god, made war with his father for the rule of the universe.
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