But some gave her cunning, falsehood and a restless curiosity. What could go wrong? Pandora was sent to marry a titan they came before gods in the Greek creation story named Epimetheus. As a wedding gift, Zeus gave them a precious, bejewelled box — and its key. You can see where this is going…. She opened the box. Out flew all the terrible plagues of mankind: disease, hunger, pain, despair.
The myth of Pandora teaches us to resist temptation and be happy with our blessings. Meet Theseus, a hero who completed many powerful deeds before turning his attention to the Minotaur — the deformed half-human, half-bull son of Minos, King of Crete. Minos fed human sacrifices to the Minotaur, who lived in a labyrinth.
Brave Theseus vowed to kill the beast to end the tragedies. He boarded his ship to Crete with black sails. In Crete, he met Ariadne. The brave hero entered the labyrinth and slayed the Minotaur with his bare hands. He followed the string out, grabbed his lady friend and delightedly set sail to Athens. During the journey, Theseus decided he did not like Ariadne and, despite his promise to her, dropped her at an island and fled.
Amidst the excitement and betrayal, Theseus forgot his second promise. The moral is to remain grounded. Always keep your promises. And always, always listen to your parents…. Disliking Minos, Daedalus advised Ariadne to give Theseus the string. Minos found out and banished Daedalus, with his son Icarus, into the labyrinth.
The father and son beat their wings and escaped, flying triumphantly over Crete. What a beautiful image! Sadly, Greek myths never do end well. Poor Icarus got carried away. During this madness, he killed Megara and his children. Devastated, he went to the Oracle of Delphi to atone for this sin. Apollo guided him by telling him to go into servitude to the king Eurystheus for ten years, which he immediately did. Though Eurystheus was his cousin, he loathed Heracles because he was afraid that he was a threat to his throne.
He sought to fabricate a situation where Heracles could be killed. Initially they were only ten labors, but Eurystheus refused to recognize two of them for technicalities, and assigned Heracles two more, which he also did.
Daphne was a beautiful nymph, the daughter of a river god. When Apollo saw her, he was smitten with her, and tried hard to win her over. Daphne, however, constantly refused his advances. The more she refused, the more the god tried to have her, becoming more and more effusive, until he tried to capture her. Daphne then pleaded to the gods to free her from Apollo, and she turned into a laurel tree. Zeus was always fond of chasing after beautiful nymphs.
He would make love to them as often as he could escape the vigilance of his wife Hera. For that purpose, one day he ordered the nymph Echo to distract Hera while he was off playing with the other wood nymphs in the area. Echo obeyed, and when Hera was seen at the slopes of Mount Olympus trying to find out where Zeus was and what he was doing, Echo chatted her up and distracted her for a long time.
When Hera realized the ruse, she cursed Echo to only be able to repeat the last words people told her. Because of her doomed love of Narcissus, she withered away until only her voice remained. Narcissus was a gorgeous young man. Echo was already cursed to only be able to repeat what was last told her when she saw him and fell in love with him.
However, Narcissus did not reciprocate the feelings. Not only that, but he told her he would rather die than make love to a nymph. Echo was devastated, and from that depression, she stopped eating and drinking and died soon after. The goddess Nemesis punished Narcissus for his harshness and hubris by making him fall in love with his own reflection in a lake.
Trying to get nearer to it, he fell in the lake and drowned. Theseus was the son of King Aegeus and Poseidon, as they both made love to his mother Aethra on the same night. Aethra raised Theseus in Troezin, in the Peloponnese. She told him to go to Athens to find his father, without telling him who it was, when he was strong enough to lift an enormous boulder.
Underneath it, he found a sword and sandals that belonged to Aegeus. Theseus took them and decided to travel to Athens on foot. The journey was perilous because the road was full of terrible bandits who prayed on the travelers who did not go by boat. Theseus killed every bandit and other peril he encountered, making the roads to Athens safe.
The journey is called The Six Labors of Theseus, where he killed five terrible bandits and a giant pig monster. At the last moment, Aegeus recognized the sword and sandals Theseus was wearing and he stopped him from drinking from a poisoned cup. He banished Medea for her attempt. The Minotaur was a half-bull, half-man monster that lived in the Labyrinth, a giant maze underneath the palace of Knossos made by the master architect and inventor, Daedalus. Once the young people entered the Labyrinth, they could never find the way out, and eventually, the Minotaur found them and ate them.
Once Theseus arrived in Crete, the princess Ariadne fell in love with him and decided to help him. She gave him a spooled thread and told him to tie one end to the entrance of the Labyrinth, and one to always keep on him, so he could find the way out. Theseus followed her advice and after a fierce battle with the Minotaur, he managed to find his way out and eloped with Ariadne.
Should Theseus have died in the Labyrinth, the sails were to remain black, as they were in mourning for the deaths of the youth that were being sent to Crete. Theseus promised. However, he forgot to change the sails upon his return. When Aegeus saw the ship in the horizon, he saw it still had black sails and believed that his son Theseus was dead. Overcome with grief and despair, he threw himself into the sea and drowned. The sea then got his name and became the Aegean Sea ever since.
Acrisius was the king of Argos. He had no sons, only a daughter named Danae. He visited the Oracle at Delphi to ask about having a son. But instead, he was told that Danae would bear a son who would kill him. Frightened, Acrisius imprisoned Danae in a room without windows. From that union Perseus, the earliest demigod, was born. When Acrisius realized it, he shut Danae and her baby in a box and tossed her to the sea.
Danae and her baby were found by Dictys, a fisherman who raised Perseus to adulthood. Dictys also had a brother, Polydectes, who wanted Danae and saw her son as an obstacle. He sought to find a way to dispose of him. He tricked him into accepting a dare: to take the head of the terrible Medusa and return with it. Medusa was one of the three Gorgons: she was a monster with snakes growing on her head instead of hair.
Her glance could turn anyone into stone. Out of the three Gorgons, she was the only mortal sister. He hid and took her head while Medusa was sleeping, and hid her head in a special bag because it could still turn people into stone. When he returned, he used the head to turn Polydectes into stone and allow his mother to live happily with Dictys. You might also like: Medusa and Athena Myth.
Bellerophon was a great hero and demigod, born of Poseidon. When Bellerophon turned her down, she rushed to her husband with complaints that Bellerophon tried to rape her. The Chimera was a terrible beast that breathed fire. It had the body of a goat, the tail of a snake and the head of a lion. To be able to face the Chimera, Poseidon gave him Pegasus, the winged horse. Riding Pegasus, Bellerophon flew near enough the Chimera to slay it. Sisyphus was the cunning king of Corinth.
When his time came to die, the god of death Thanatos came to him with shackles. Sisyphus was not afraid. Instead, he asked Thanatos to show him how the shackles worked. He tricked the god and captured him with his own shackles!
However, with Thanatos captured, people stopped dying. This started becoming a huge problem until Ares freed Thanatos. Sisyphus then knew he was going to be taken, but he asked his wife not to bury his body. Once in the underworld, he complained that his wife had not given him proper burial rites and he had no coin to pay the ferryman to carry him over the river Styx.
Hades felt compassion for him and allowed him to return to life to discipline his wife into giving him rites. Instead, however, Sisyphus refused to return to the underworld and lived out his days. Upon his second death, the gods punished him by forcing him to push a boulder up a slope. As soon as it reached the top, the boulder would roll down again and Sisyphus had to start all over again, for all eternity. Tantalus was the son of Zeus and the nymph Plouto.
He was a favorite among the gods and he often was welcomed to Olympus for godly banquets. But Tantalus abused his privilege by stealing ambrosia, the food of the gods. The legendary Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus decreed that the Spartans should use only iron as currency, making it so cumbersome that even a small amount would have to be carried by a yoke of oxen. This story may be part of the idealisation of the ancient Spartans as a warrior society dedicated to military pre-eminence.
While classical Sparta did not mint its own coins, it used foreign silver, and some Spartan leaders were notoriously prone to bribery. However, laws may have been passed to prevent Spartans importing luxuries that might threaten to undermine their hardiness. When the Athenian playboy general Alcibiades defected to Sparta during its war with Athens in the late 5th Century, he adopted their meagre diet, tough training routines, coarse clothing, and Laconic expressions.
But eventually his passion for all things Spartan extended to the king's wife Timaea, who became pregnant. Alcibiades returned to Athens, whence he had fled eight years earlier to avoid charges of shocking sacrilege, one of which was that he had subjected Athens' holy Mysteries to mockery.
What were the secrets of the Greek Mystery Cults? If I told you, I'd have to kill you. The secrets were fiercely guarded, and severe penalties were prescribed for anyone who divulged them or who, like Alcibiades, were thought to have profaned them. Initiates were required to undergo initiation rites which may have included transvestism and centred on secret objects perhaps phalluses and passwords being revealed.
The aim was to give devotees a glimpse of the "other side", so that they could return to their lives blessed in the knowledge that when their turn came to die they could ensure the survival of their soul in the Underworld. Excavations have uncovered tombs containing passwords and instructions written on thin gold sheets as an aide-memoire for deceased devotees.
The principal Greek Mystery Cults were those of Demeter, goddess of agriculture, and of Dionysus also known as Bacchus , god of wine, ecstasy - and of theatre. Who first made a drama out of a crisis?
How did theatres begin? In 5th Century Athens, theatre was closely connected to the cult of Dionysus, in whose theatre on the southern slopes of the Acropolis tragedies and comedies were staged at an annual festival. But the origin of theatre is a much-debated issue.
One tradition tells of the actor Thespis hence "thespian" standing on a cart and playing a dramatic role for the first time around BC; another claims that drama began with ritual choruses and gradually introduced actors' parts. Aristotle BC supposed that the choruses of tragedy were originally ritual songs dithyrambs sung and danced in Dionysus' honour, while comedy emerged out of ribald performances involving model phalluses.
As a god associated with shifting roles and appearances, Dionysus seems an apt choice of god to give rise to drama.
But from the earliest extant tragedy, Aeschylus' Persians of BC, few surviving tragedies have anything to do with Dionysus. Comic drama was largely devoted to making fun of contemporary figures - including in several plays most famously in Aristophanes' Clouds the philosopher Socrates.
What made Socrates think about becoming a philosopher? Socrates BC may have had his head in the clouds, and was portrayed in Aristophanes' comedy as entertaining ideas ranging from the scientifically absurd "How do you measure a flea's jump? This picture is at odds with the main sources of biographical data on Socrates, the writings of his pupils Plato and Xenophon.
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